Fictional characters who shaped my life (not in any order): Grantaire
Lemme see, I read Les Miserables round about February time- February 2013, just after the movie- so I’ve known Grantaire maybe six months, even though it feels like I’ve known him all my life. All that stuff he talks about, all the depressing cynical stuff, I’ve thought a lot of that. That line he has about the sun not coming out all day, I’ve thought that one pretty much word-for-word, even.
So it was good to properly meet him. As you may already know, he was one of those characters who you only really got the full measure of via the little details- he seemed so harsh and uncaring a lot of the time, but in the course of his many drunken rambles he talked about poverty and street children and slavery and suffering, and it started to dawn that he is what he is not through arrogance or nastiness but because he’s just plain given up hope. It seems to be a collective fandom headcanon that he probably had clinical depression (before there was actually a name for it) and I agree totally.
Well, getting right down to it- and bearing all that in mind- Grantaire in the novel is an absolute mess. He rants at anyone who’ll listen, he insults people probably without even meaning to, he does his absolute best to drink out the world and he’s in love with a man who disdains him at best and harshly rejects him at worst. He wears his cynicism like a mask, calls himself stupid, lets slip that his own father apparently despised him, and sometimes seems to be practically trying to get his friends to despise him too…hasn’t almost everyone actually had a friend like that, come to think of it? I think I might have. It might even have been me sometimes, I don’t like myself most of the time either. And there are Grantaires everywhere, at parties and in bars and buried in early graves. I wish I could save them all.
Victor Hugo’s own words nicely sum up Grantaire’s whole story in just a couple of sentences: His mind could get along without belief, but his heart could not get along without friendship. A profound contradiction; for an affection is a conviction. Or, you know, love is power, and Grantaire gets one of the best selfless-love stories in a novel packed full of them- you might well know how it goes by now. Grantaire drinks himself into a coma before the big final battle and wakes up to find Enjolras about to be executed by the National Guard, alone. The firing squad don’t notice him, though, so he could have escaped with his life, he could have just slumped back down. But he doesn’t do that- he gets up, shouts “I’m one of them!“ and goes to stand with Enjolras in front of the guns. Then he turns to the person he loves and asks if he minds – oh Grantaire – sharing his last moments with him. Enjolras smiles and takes his hand, just before they die…you probably know that bit, too. And that’s it, that’s the end, although the very last mention of Grantaire in the novel comes when Marius remembers all the “dear, sorrowful, valiant, charming or tragic beings” he’s lost.
This is already quite a long ramble (Grantaire would be proud) and I still haven’t touched on a ton of interesting and important stuff: the Biblical allusions throughout his story, the way he’s described when he stands up and walks forward (it breaks my heart, in a good way), his love for his friends – or the fact that, during my half-year in fandom, I’ve realised that he means a hell of a lot to a lot of people. (Not bad, Hugo, not bad.) And me included, absolutely. You can be a mess, be alienating and miserable and depressive and harsh and still be dear, valiant and missed? Count me in. Les Mis is a novel full of wonderful people, there’s so many to choose from, but I think about Grantaire so often and what he represented in the story, and honestly, I want to be one of him.