He came to our place one Sunday in November 189–.
François is the narrator of this novel. That fact alone would naturally enough lead one to suspect that he might be the main figure in the story, but the story he is about to tell conspicuously refers not to himself, but some as-yet-unidentified other. The narrator often fulfills the dual role of protagonist, but it would be something of a stretch to identify the narrator as the protagonist of this tale. While narrator/protagonist double duty is perhaps more common, just below that commonality is a secondary example of the first-person narrator whose job is to tell the story of the actual protagonist and, in the second-hand telling, convey a broader perspective. When it comes to François, it might be helpful to think of Nick Carraway. Carraway is the first-person narrator charged with telling a story about someone much greater than himself: Jay Gatsby.
...someone came and swept me away from all these tranquil, childish joys – someone who snuffed out the candle that had cast its light on my mother's gentle face as she prepared our evening meal; someone who turned of fthe light around which we gathered as a happy family on those evenings, after my father has closed the wooden shutters across the French windows. And that someone was Augustin Meaulnes, soon to be called by the other pupils, `The Great Meaulnes' – `Le Grand Meaulnes.'
The "he" who came to their place in that opening line of the novel is the actual protagonist of the novel, Augustin Meaulnes. François at the time is a fifteen-year-old in a small French village living with his two schoolteacher parents. As a result of age and isolation, his life is uneventful in an entirely uneventful way; the very quality the lack of excitement marking his life to that point is itself only notable for not being any different than a million other boys just like him. Once again, the parallel to Nick Carraway is strong and once again it is made even stronger by the arrival into his unexceptional life of a remarkable figure who also just happens to very quickly earn the distinction of being "Great."
That night, my friend did not tell me all that happened to him on the road. And even when he did make up his mind to tell me everything, during some days of unhappiness that I shall describe later, it was to remain the great secret of our adolescent years. But today, now it is all over, now that nothing is left but dust of so much ill, of so much good, I can describe his strange adventure.
It is one particularly strange event in the life of Augustin that is the driving engine of the narrative. Augustin's weirdly offbeat adventure is quite more obviously inspired by fairy tales since it features a semi-mystical chalet, the sudden appearance and then equally sudden dismissal of kinetic children, and an alluring siren who it seems might not have been real at all. If the narration of François is to be believed—and the reader only his word for what supposedly happened to Augustin—she is very real and his friend’s strange adventure on a snowy night was also very real. "The Great Meaulnes" is no Gatsby, but his story related second-hand by his closest friend truly earns him the superlative.
