Buccaneeering - Buccaneeer

Anytime I see people who say 'Erik should have gotten Chirstine!' I always let out such a loud sigh because they are completely missing the point of the book.

The tradgedy is not, and never has been, the fact that The Phantom didn't get Christine, it's the fact that he never got to be human.

Erik, as a character, is so insanely full of love and yearning and that is exactly what leads people to sympathise with him; to lead them to the point of 'if he got the girl everything would be fine'. He's poetic with his suffering and expresses his truama in a obsessive and borderline psychopathic way in order to deal with it and get what he wants. To have what he never had; real affection. To be kissed without his masked chucked at his face.

To be looked at with fondness instead of fear.

Leroux's whole point with the character of The Phantom isn't that he's another man who deserved the girl, his point was how real life literature Others are treated. Erik is both The Hunchback of Notre Dame's Quasimodo and Jane Eyre's Bertha Mason. Both, of which, despite the fact they don't conform to societal standards, still deserve to be treated as humans.

Erik deserves to be treated like a human despite his deformity, despite his otherness that has literally forced him into the basement of an Opera House he helped build; to be loved like any human wants love. Everybody in that book demonises him for such a human feeling and that is the point. That is the metaphorical kick to the chest.

Further, rounding back around to the 'if he got the girl everything would be fine'. If Erik got Christine, he wouldn't learn that the fact he murdered multiple people to get there, that he threatened to blow up half of Paris, that he tricked a young girl into believing he was her dead father, was wrong. If he got what he wanted, with no consequences, then it wouldn't teach Erik anything, because he would never learn what real affection would be like.

That's why, at the end of the book, where Christine shows him genuine love, willingly, he absolutely crumbles because he realises that is what it means to be human. To feel human; pure love given of someone's own accord.

To love is to be changed, as the poets' say, and that's exactly what it does to him.

@alisdairvalentine

Valjean and javert off down the pub