three remarks on Flaubert's style: 1) Flaubert uses the personal pronoun counter-intuitively. This is always grammatically plausible, but very unexpected. When one expects that "il" refers to the subject of the previous sentence, it is, for instance, used to indicate an object in that sentence; or when "elle" is supposed to indicate the human subject, it points a feminine noun. This sort of complication is numerous. Why? The only explanation I came up with is that Flaubert wants us to read very carefully, always forcing us to ask anew what pronouns refer to in each context, almost against the commonsensical flow of sentences. Probably this is lost in translation, for English can render "il" and "elle" into he/she and it, thus clarifying deliberate obscurities in Flaubert's style; 2) Flaubert's narrator is, it seems to me, peculiarly anonymous, though very much ominipresent in every sentence. For instance, the description of the harbor on the opening page is first presented as rather neutral. But as it goes on it is being suggested that Moreaus is observing the ship leaving from Paris and the tone and nuance of this description cannot be separated from the protagonist's perspective and mental state, though still to some extent independent from his particular gaze-mind. Proust writes that Flaubert's style allows characters speak as freely as possible with the minimum amount of quotation marks; 3) Flaubert's narration is uneven and irregular. Sometimes he spends pages to describe one single scene, while months could pass only in a paragraph. And this change of pace is so casual and unaffected, not so strongly marked, that, if one reads absent-mindedly, one is surprised, a few paragraphs later, at finding that characters don't look the same, having no idea why they change so suddenly (I mean, I would experience this many times in reading Flaubert).
