Research Paper on:
Andre Breton's Nadja

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
commentary. One such commentary would be Bretons theme of hope in the novel Nadja. "Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps  everything would amount to knowing whom I haunt(Breton 11). The protagonist of the novel is the author, himself. It is during the 1920s and the hero is  wandering the streets of Paris in search of meaning. It is here that he meets a woman whom he only knows as Nadja. This woman is clearly insane, or so  he thinks. Nadja, the reader discovers, is the Russian word for hope. Bretons thoughts on hope are two fold, the student may wish to state. First, there is the  blatant message, which is that of hope being lost amongst us. Nadja doesnt seem to have a home, and symbolically, neither does hope in the post war France.  Secondly, hope is there in the middle of the people, but people run from it, just as they run from Nadja, or they use  it, just as they do Nadja, or they simply deny that it exists at all. All of this continues to happen until one day, the narrators has to place her  into an asylum because he can no longer stand her screaming. In an appalling manner, he turns his back on her and never discovers what became of her. The narrator,  though he turns his back on hope, at least knows where he can find it if he needs to. Additionally, it almost seems as if Breton were saying that hope  only exists for the insane because they have no ability to be disillusioned. Their fantasy is always there before them. "My image of the ghost including everything conventional about its