As Pierce suggests, the narration of this novel is shared between a combination of various subjective skaz narrators mixed with an omniscient objective narrator. The clear links between these narratives allows for a high level of intricacy in the novel’s plot, yet each narrative layer is distinctive, with varying narrative voices. They are inherently connected: the Jerusalem sections are presented as the Master’s novel, and the supernatural events are interwoven within the everyday in Moscow. It is generally accepted that the novel has 3 plot levels: the everyday Moscow life, the fantastic or supernatural Moscow level, and the historical Pontius Pilate chapters. Unravelling this novel seems equally as complicated as I imagine constructing it in the first place would have been. Furthermore, the supernatural elements of this novel render death ambiguous in this absurd cosmic world nothing seems certain and endings no longer have their sense of finality. This structure provides the perfect setting for the novel’s central philosophical debate: the question of good and evil, a binary that was becoming increasingly less plausible in 1930s Stalinist Russia. Firstly the narrative structure of this text lends itself to establishing ambiguity: a combination of several opposing spatiotemporal narrative planes, from Jerusalem to an unfamiliar Moscow.
And it all ends tragically: a man who still recently thought he was governing something, suddenly winds up lying motionless in a wooden box, and the people around him, seeing that the man lying there is no longer good for anything, burn him in an oven.Widely considered to be a true masterpiece of 20 th century Russian literature, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita continues to divide critics, who incessantly search for its elusive meaning, whilst confronted with an ambiguity that penetrates deep into the core of this multi-textured and complex narrative. Like the first, so the second and third are completely senseless, as you understand. Feeling that something is wrong, you rush to learned doctors, then to quacks, and sometimes to fortune-tellers as well. – here the foreigner smiled sweetly, and if the thought of lung cancer gave him pleasure - yes, cancer - narrowing his eyes like a cat, he repeated the sonorous word -and so your governing is over! You are no longer interested in anyone’s fate but your own. Allow me to ask you, then, how can man govern, if he is not only deprived of the opportunity of making a plan for at least some ridiculously short period, well, say, a thousand years, but cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow? And in fact, – here the stranger turned to Berlioz, – imagine that you, for instance, start governing, giving orders to others and yourself, generally, so to speak, acquire a taste for it, and suddenly you get. – Pardon me, – the stranger responded gently, – but in order to govern, one needs, after all, to have a precise plan for a certain, at least somewhat decent, length of time. – Man governs it himself, – Homeless angrily hastened to reply to this admittedly none-too-clear question. “– But here is a question that is troubling me: if there is no God, then, one may ask, who governs human life and, in general, the whole order of things on earth?
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