The Master and Margarita varies its style by plot strand. The novel presents three separate narratives—Woland’s mischief across Moscow, Ha-Nozri’s trial, the Master’s love affair—and changes their telling accordingly. Woland’s escapades across Moscow are surreal, madcap, and comic—all of which the novel emphasizes through its digressive, rambling narration and wry asides. The Master and Margarita calls attention to its own outlandish events and the foibles of its characters. “What are clever people for if not to get confusions straightened out?” the narrator remarks in mock praise of Maximilian Andreyevich just before his fateful encounter with Koroviev. The novel seemingly smirks at the Devil’s mischievous triumphs over the blundering mortals.
Some of these comic flourishes carry over to Pontius Pilate’s narrative, though to a lesser extent. In cartoonish fashion, the Hegemon orders Mark Rat-Killer to discipline Ha-Nozri for his improper address. Bulgakov’s prose becomes more restrained and descriptive as it captures the “distant, low, and menacing sound of trumpets” and the “opaque, purple wave” that floats before Pilate’s eyes. The novel takes a meditative turn as it retraces Ha-Nozri’s steps.
Bulgakov unlocks a still more poetic dimension in his account of the Master’s love for Margarita. Margarita’s journey to reclaim her lover—which takes her to faraway woods, apartment 50, and Satanic ballrooms—combines some of the first narrative’s surrealist emphasis and the second strand’s lyricism. When Woland sets the Master and Margarita down in their final, otherworldly paradise, “Margarita's words flowed like the flowing, whispering stream they had left behind.”
Even with its different voices, the novel segues smoothly from one narrative to the next. Some sections take up the final sentence of the previous narrative, shifting the reader across separate stories in somewhat hypnotic fashion. Together, these woven styles and stories produce a complex and textured effect.