The Passion Themes

In The Passion, passion is a form of uncontrollable, overwhelming love that remakes the life and identity of the person who experiences it—whether positively or negatively. Passion rules the lives of the novel’s two narrators, Villanelle and Henri. Teenaged Villanelle is working at the Casino in Venice when she falls in love with a married woman, the woman with gray-green eyes. Villanelle experiences her passion for the woman with gray-green eyes as…

In The Passion, storytelling is a double-edged sword that simultaneously destroys the truth and creates reality. While narrator Henri is a young man in Napoleon Bonaparte’s army, he begins to journal his experiences in an attempt to record the truth of what he feels so that memory won’t play tricks on him later. Yet when he mentions his journaling plans to his friend Domino, Napoleon’s groom (stable hand), Domino challenges Henri’s presuppositions…

The Passion represents war as the opposite of gambling: a human pastime that contains no risk and no surprise because it assures inevitable bad outcomes. It also suggests that war is incompatible with truth: it is a perverse form of storytelling that always leads to falsehood. One of the novel’s narrators, a young Frenchman named Henri, joins Napoleon Bonaparte’s army because he believes Napoleon’s promises that French conquest will ultimately end war and…

The Passion represents hero-worship and religion as fundamentally destructive forms of passion, because the passionate person cannot truly know their love object or have their passion reciprocated by their love’s object. The novel illustrates the destructive nature of hero-worship and religion through the fates of Russian peasants, the young French soldier Henri, and Henri’s mother. When Napoleon Bonaparte invades Russia as winter is approaching, the Russian army burns the land and homes of…