In any literary work that has been written, there exist many relationships within it. There are relationships between characters, between the reader and the author, between characters, between the reader and author, and between a single person and his surrounding society. In these aspects, The Life of Henry Brulard is no different from most other published works. There is however, one relationship that presents a bit of curiosity to the reader. That bit of curiosity can be seen in the relationship that exists between the author, Stendhal, and the narrator in the book. In the standard author and narrator relationship, one and the other are usually the same. In the Life of Henry Brulard, on the other hand, the author tries to distance himself as much as possible from the book's narrator. Some of the reason why the author chose to proceed with this approach becomes clear while reading through the book, while others can only be seen and understood after looking outside of the book.
             Stendhal was one of a hundred and fifty pseudonyms used by Henri Marie Beyle, the nineteenth century writer responsible for writing The Life of Henry Brulard. In The Life of Henry Brulard, Stendhal ruthlessly looks back at his experiences of childhood and adolescence. Stendhal's chronology reveals him as a deeply passionate man, whose hatred of boredom took him on numerous adventures both of action and of the heart. A swift journey through Stendhal's experiences depicts him as a young man, fiercely rebellious of his Royalist bourgeois father and the Jesuit tutoring that he was subjected to. As an ardent admirer of Napoleon, he took advantage of family connections to secure an army post and later a governmental career. His mentor early in life had been his literary grand father, and his career guide later was his cousin Pierre Daru, a man only a few steps behind Napoleon's command. His aspirations to write gave rise to many works...