Crveno i crno

Red and Black is a social chronicle about the fate of a poor, ambitious young man in the Restoration era, in which, in a precise classicist style and a tone ranging from sarcastic to poetic, it expresses the romanticism of the hero's rebellion against ossified social structures and morals. It is a developmental novel, compositionally divided into two parts by a change of setting (province and Paris). It is mostly narrated from the hero's perspective, and sometimes the omniscient narrator appears with poetical (he explains the so-called aesthetics of the mirror about the novel as a reflection of social reality) or moralistic comments. The hero of the novel ultimately becomes a victim of the split between his intimate and public personality, hiding and cultivating his true identity (the interplay of these actions is a permanent feature of Stendhal's works), unable to reconcile conflicting emotions and ambitions. This duality is already reflected in the title and structured by a series of narrative and semantic dichotomies (love and death, love as passion and love as vanity, two women in the hero's life, republic and monarchy, Paris and province, sensitivity and voluntarism, truth and lie, action and contemplation, army and church).