One of the themes in Muriel Barbery’s novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, deals with the different personas in which each character portrays. The main protagonists within the novel, Renee Michel and Paloma Josse, wear figurative masks to disguise their real identities, while they try to follow the standards set by their individual class systems. In The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Barbery tells the story through the different perspectives of Renee and Paloma as they learn to accept their lives and reveal their unique individualities. In The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Renee Michel is the concierge of a high-end Paris apartment complex for extremely wealthy families where she often goes unnoticed. She is a 54-year-old widow who was born into the lower class of France’s economic structure. According to Renee, she has “…always been poor, discreet, and insignificant” (Barbery 19). Renee has never been to college and feels trapped in her life as a concierge, a job the requires no…show more content… She hides her intelligence in order to blend in with the crowd. Paloma feels alienated from her family and other children in her building because she sees the world from a different perspective. Paloma is an outcast to her family and peers because of her high IQ, and she often conceals her given talents to fit in with societal norms. This disconnection from the world, her companions, and herself leads Paloma to question the meaning of life to the point of contemplating suicide on her thirteenth birthday; “No one seems to have thought of the fact that life is absurd, being a brilliant success has no greater value than being a failure” (Barbery 24). Paloma travels through her twelfth year of life searching for reasons to stay and shed the mask that she uses to hide her true intellect from the
