Indeed, the constant reminders of the task at hand—disentangling the unsolved or incorrectly resolved mystery of the Count de Chagny’s death and the disappearances of Christine Daaé and Raoul de Chagny, and establishing irrefutably the existence of the opera ghost, Erik—and the multiple forms of “evidence” that the narrator provides serve at once as the glue that holds the novel’s various threads together and the motor that drives the story forward.

The story itself, of course, is the purest of fictions. Combining the visual record of his descent below the Opera House with research on the building’s construction and history, Leroux set to imagining an individual who would have reason to—and could—survive indefinitely in the Opera’s mysterious lower depths. The result was the creation of a human monster, suffering the physical and mental effects of a deformity so severe that he was completely rejected by society. Among other texts, Leroux was inspired in this macabre conjuring by the Gothic backdrop and terror of such novels as Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). From a thematic perspective, Leroux’s thoughts were stirred in great part by the message about inner beauty set forth in Charles Perrault’s La Belle et la Bête (1697; The Beauty and the Beast), the impossible love depicted in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831; The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), and, even more directly, the legend of Faust.

Familiar with both Goethe’s 1808 play and the opera it had inspired (Charles Gounod’s Faust of 1859), Leroux found in the character of Faust a model for the psychological underpinnings of the monster he was shaping. Indeed—although the circumstances of Erik’s unhappy past and of the “present” depicted in the novel differ markedly from those that lead to Faust’s pact with the devil—the notion of a genius whose power is fueled by dark creative energy is central to the two tales and their resolutions. The author’s choice of Faust, which is performed in a number of scenes—including, most significantly, the one in which Christine disappears—reinforces this parallel between two souls bursting with knowledge and truncated by their hatred of humanity.

The influence of the tradition of fantastic literature of the nineteenth century upon The Phantom of the Opera is also of central importance to our understanding of the text. This genre, which began to emerge in France in the 1830s following a translation into French of stories by German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann, flourished for a period of more than sixty years, and was addressed by such authors as Charles Nodier, Théophile Gautier, Gérard de Nerval, Prosper Mérimée, and Guy de Maupassant. In its early manifestations, the short stories, novellas, and novels of the fantastic combined realistic and plausible elements with elements of fantasy, reverie, and the supernatural (such as ghosts, demons, and spells). Unlike the fairytale, which had long flourished in France and which was itself replete with supernatural characters and improbable actions and events, the fantastic tale in no way sought to provide a neat, packaged, or moral resolution to conflicts: On the contrary, multiple possibilities were advanced, and the ending never pronounced the validity of one over another. In this way, the reader was constantly faced with an uncertainty that was part of the text’s inherent design.

The crowning achievement of the early fantastic was Mérimée’s La Vénus de L‘Ille (1837; The Venus of Ille), which insistently suggests—all the while proposing other, far more rational explanations—that a jealous statue comes to life and murders a would-be groom on his wedding night. The author succeeds amazingly in engaging the reader’s desire for understanding in such a way that the solution is indefinitely and stubbornly suspended. While later writers of the fantastic, such as Maupassant and Barbey d’Aurevilly, continued to rely on the creation of multiple, concurrent potential meanings, the realistic footings and markers that had characterized earlier examples of fantastic literature tended to disappear. The reader engaged more and more in a pact to suspend disbelief, and some of the more extreme texts written during this period—such as Auguste de Villiers de l‘Isle-Adam’s L’Ève future (Tomorrow’s Eve)—can be seen as precursors to modern science-fiction writing.

From the physical characteristics and mind-boggling abilities of the opera ghost, to the exotic character of the Persian, to the rat-catcher and the spectral “shade” who polices the underground, to the elaborately detailed torture chamber, elements of the fantastic abound and multiply in The Phantom of the Opera. Yet the defining features of the genre are in large part turned on their head by Leroux, who, positing himself as the narrator in the novel’s prologue, firmly promises from the novel’s opening paragraph to deliver clarity and indisputable proof—not purposeful confusion. In immediately asserting that the opera ghost “existed in flesh and blood” (p. 5), he seemingly deflates the possibility, inherent to fantastic literature, that multiple, contradictory explanations for the events described can coexist. However, one can find in the novel, also from this opening paragraph, a palpable tension between the reasonable accounts that are unrelentingly provided at every turn—that is to say, the compulsion to demystify the motivations and actions of the ghost in question—and an emphasis on the fantastic. Indeed, curiously, and quite paradoxically, the more the narrator insists upon the veracity of the events at the Opera House that he has uncovered, reinterpreted, and elucidated for the reader, and the more he stresses that the “ghost” was in reality just a normal man, the more fantastic the ghost’s story and actions become.

As mentioned above, the narrator’s insistence upon the ghost’s existence is at every moment supported by the multi-p le, layered forms of corroborating proof (all of which are, of course, fictional) that he furnishes and cites at length, from the memoirs of Monsieur Armand Moncharmin (one of the Opera House’s two bumbling managers), to Christine Daaé’s papers (scrupulously studied by the narrator to assure their authenticity), to the Persian’s manuscript, to which five chapters of the novel are dedicated to reproducing—“verbatim” (p. 199). In addition, numerous police reports and documents, statements by and interviews with key participants and witnesses, and historical sources are referenced by the narrator in his quest to have the definitive word on the subject. While the narrator’s voice is in turn serious, mocking, condescending, and ironic, it never wavers—from the novel’s first page to its last—from this intransigent authoritative stance. Yet, at the same time, the stability and objectivity of this elaborately constructed fictional framework is undercut by the narrator’s unadulterated, nonjournalistic pleasure in recreating for the reader the terror that the opera ghost inspired and in slowly revealing how he orchestrated his various mystifying feats.

In the manner of all good serial novelists, who understand that the foundation of their genre—developed in France in the early part of the nineteenth century primarily as a gimmick to sell newspapers—is prolonged suspense, Leroux the novelist knew, above all, how to shape Leroux the narrator and the story in such a way that the reader is left constantly wanting to know more. It is in this way, for example, that many of the descriptive details provided—such as those relative to the Opera House’s interior, rooftop, and lower depths—have more to do with establishing the fantastic mood that envelops the story than with furthering the “investigation.” Similarly, as a way of drawing out the essential core of the information that the narrator has but the reader does not, throughout the book Leroux uses the technique employed by most serial novelists of the time (who were generally paid by the word and thus invested in extending the length of their novels): building anticipation by alternating a serious tone with a more comic one. Lighter chapters, such as those which recount the managers’ exploits surrounding the ghost’s “payment,” serve in this fashion to offset the more dire events. It is thus in merging reworked conventions of the fantastic with the techniques of the serial novelist and the rational, explicit approach favored in the burgeoning detective story that Leroux arrives at his particular method of creating and prolonging suspense—precisely by deflating it: The reader knows the novel’s outcome from the beginning, but must patiently wait for the narrator to unravel the mystery of the characters’ motivation.

In addition to the twists and turns of this slow disclosure, what is revealed little by little in The Phantom of the Opera is the world of illusion that is the theater. Indeed, beyond its historical significance, the setting of the Opera Garnier (where all but a select few of the novel’s scenes take place) constantly draws our attention to the relationship between reality and appearance, between art and artifice. As with two sides of a coin, we witness both creation (the onstage production of operas such as Faust) and the behind-the-scenes preparations and dramatics as dancers, singers, stagehands, costume and set designers, directors, and managers perform their functions with various degrees of enthusiasm and competency.