Yep, it brought me back many years to The Brothers Karamazov where everyone has at least a triple-name — Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz, and Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyryov (who writes under the pen name Bezdomny) are the two characters we meet by the second paragraph of this novel by Mikhail Bulgakov (who, poor man, is missing a middle name!). By page three I was flipping back because I couldn’t believe that the same man was referred to by different names in the same sentence.
But there is so much delight here that overcomes my annoyances. A discussion between the two above named characters who are editor and poet about the non-existence of Jesus Christ. An odd foreign stranger who come up to them and politely asks to join the conversation. As Bulgakov gives the the reader access to the consternation of the first two gentlemen towards the stranger, wondering where indeed he is from, he also gives us a clue as to the nature of the man. A German? An Englishman? A Pole? From France? Set in Russia, these two would more easily narrow an European down closer than this. And he speaks of breakfasting with Immanuel Kant, centuries dead.
Religion, philosophy, history, all here within the first short chapter and I’m going to love this: magical realism to bring it all together.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
Is Ivan the narrator, or are there more than one narrators.Is Matthew the narrator of the execution?
In third person pov, the narrator is an unnamed storyteller. Ivan is just a character, and if you are talking about the execution of Yeshua and referring to the Gospel of Matthew, no, Matthew is not the narrator. In this particular instance, the narrator is in fact Professor Woland, as he relates the story (Chapter 2). Though again, the unseen narrator of the novel may in fact be telling the story verbatim from the professor.