He perceives himself as a voyeur, witnessing couples, sumptuous dining rooms, professionals at work and scenes of family life.
[2] In the second part, the young author loses his virginity with Marie, a worldly-wise courtesan who recounts her personal story of erotic experience.
However, as the reader later learns, she subsequently becomes a tabula rasa, providing her body for the enjoyment of men, but not her individuality or personality.
[4] In his biography of Flaubert, Frederick Brown compares the narrator to other literary adolescents, such as Chateaubriand's René (1802), Abbé Prévost's Chevalier des Grieux (1731), Goethe's Werther (1734), Musset's Octave and others, who also fail to become adults due to their inability to reach psychological maturity, although parents are not mentioned in November, unlike similar contemporary works.
[5] Marie, in Frederick Brown's interpretation, is understood to be a fictionalised rendition of Eulalie Foucauld, the thirty-five-year-old Toulon innkeeper who provided Flaubert with his own sexual initiation in 1840.