ErikPhantom

The Phantom Of the Opera

In the original novel, few details are given regarding Erik's past, although there is no shortage of hints and implications throughout the book. Erik himself laments the fact that his mother was horrified by his appearance (causing him to run away from home at a young age), and that his father, a master mason, never saw him. It is also revealed that "Erik" was not, in fact, his birth name, but one that was given or found "by accident", as Erik himself says within the work. Leroux sometimes calls him "the man's voice"; Erik also refers to himself as "The Opera Ghost", "The Angel of Music", and attends a masquerade as the Red Death. Most of the character's history is revealed by a mysterious figure, known through most of the novel as The Persian or the Daroga, who had been a local police chief in Persia, following Erik to Paris; other details are discussed in the novel's epilogue e.g. his birthplace is given as a small town outside of Rouen, France.

Born hideously deformed, he is a "subject of horror" for his family and as a result, he runs away as a young boy and falls in with a band of *******, making his living as an attraction in freak shows, where he is known as "le mort vivant" ("the living death"). During his time with the tribe, Erik becomes a great illusionist, magician, and ventriloquist. His reputation for these skills and his unearthly singing voice spreads quickly, and one day a fur trader mentions him to the Shah of Persia.

The Shah orders the Persian to fetch Erik and bring him to the palace.The Shah-in-Shah commissions Erik, who proves himself a gifted architect, to construct an elaborate palace in Mazenderan. The edifice is designed with so many trap doors and secret rooms that not even the slightest whisper could be considered private. The design itself carries sound to a myriad of hidden locations, so that one never knew who might be listening. At some point under the Shah's employment, Erik is also a political assassin, using a unique noose referred to as the Punjab Lasso. The Persian dwells on the vague horrors that existed at Mazenderan rather than going in depth into the actual circumstances involved.

The Shah, pleased with Erik's work and determined that no one else should have such a palace, orders Erik blinded. Thinking that Erik could still make another palace even without his eyesight, the Shah orders Erik's execution. It is only by the intervention of the daroga (the Persian) that Erik escapes. Erik then goes to Constantinople and is employed by its ruler, helping build certain edifices in the Yildiz-Kiosk, among other things. However, he has to leave the city for the same reason he left Mazenderan: he knows too much. He also seems to have traveled to Southeast Asia, since he claims to have learned to breathe underwater using a hollow reed from the "Tonkin pirates". By this time Erik is tired of his nomadic life and wants to "live like everybody else". For a time he works as a contractor, building "ordinary houses with ordinary bricks". He eventually bids on a contract to help with the construction of the Palais Garnier, commonly known as the Paris Opéra.

During the construction he is able to make a sort of playground for himself within the Opera House, creating trapdoors and secret passageways throughout every inch of the theatre. He even builds himself a house in the cellars of the Opera where he could live far from man's cruelty. Erik has spent twenty years composing a piece entitled Don Juan Triumphant. In one chapter after he takes Christine to his lair, she asks him to play her a piece from his masterwork. He refuses and says, "I will play you Mozart, if you like, which will only make you weep; but my Don Juan, Christine, burns." Eventually, after she has wrenched off his mask and seen his deformed face, he begins to play it. Christine says that at first it seemed to be "one great awful sob," but then became alert to its nuances and power, as the music was able to convey to her the misery he has endured throughout his life and the hope he finally felt for love.

It appears Erik is familiar with the works of Edgar Allan Poe, as, at a masquerade ball, he dresses as the Red Death from Poe's story The Masque of the Red Death.

Upon its completion, he originally plans to go to his bed (which is a coffin) and "never wake up," but by the final chapters of the novel, (during which Erik kidnaps Christine right from the stage during a performance), Erik expresses his wish to marry Christine and live a comfortable bourgeois life after his work has been completed. He has stored a massive supply of gunpowder under the Opera, and, should she refuse his offer, plans to detonate it. When she acquiesces to his desires in order to save herself, her lover Raoul (who, aided by the Persian, went looking for Christine and fell into Erik's torture chamber), and the denizens of the Opera, we find out that his part of the bargain was to take the Persian and Raoul above ground.

He does so with the Persian, but Raoul was kept "a hostage" and was "locked up comfortably, properly chained" in the dungeon under the opera. When he returns, he finds Christine waiting for him, like "a real living wife" and he swore she tilted her forehead toward him, and he kissed it. Then he says he was so happy that he fell at her feet, crying, and she cries with him, calling him "poor, unhappy Erik" and taking his hand. At this point, he is "just a poor dog ready to die for her" and he returns to her the ring she had lost and said that she was free to go and marry Raoul.

Erik frees Raoul and he and Christine leave. But before they do, Erik makes Christine promise that when he dies she will come back and bury him. Then she kisses Erik's forehead. Erik dies three weeks later, but not before he goes to visit the Persian and tells him everything, and promises to send him Erik's dearest possessions: the papers that Christine wrote about everything that had happened with her "Angel of Music" and some things that had belonged to her. Christine keeps her promise and returns to the Opera to bury Erik and place the plain gold band he had given her on his finger. Leroux claims that a skeleton bearing such a ring was later unearthed in the Opera cellars.

Overall, the original Erik is intense and complex. He is seen oscillating between grandiosity and self-aggrandizing to extreme self-loathing and martyrdom. He has an ungrounded sense of right and wrong. While sometimes he is flippant or joking about murder and torture, he also shows regret for past crimes. A good example of his contradictory morality is his devotion to singing requiem masses... for those who he has killed. While the Persian says that his level of hideousness has made him feel beyond the bounds of normal human morality, Erik also demonstrates great desperation for normalcy and love, explaining that being loved is all he ever needed to be good. He can go from extreme violence to acts of extreme devotion, and is not always able to control himself. He is controlling and possessive of Christine yet acts like her faithful slave, often weeping on his knees before her. While he sometimes plays up his hideous appearance (such as sleeping in a coffin) and often makes wry, self-deprecating jokes about how he looks, he suffers genuinely and tremendously over his appearance and the effect it has on others (such as his mother). The character has a strong sense of humor and often eccentric and mysterious ways of expressing himself. He adheres to proper societal formalities and gentlemanly etiquette, such as in how he dresses, sets up his home and in how he composes his letters to management. There are also signs of him having a Catholic background, namely his preoccupation with requiem masses/the Dies Irae, his desire to be married in front of a priest in the Madeleine church and his gratitude to God at the end for giving him happiness. He is described as having almost superhuman talents, excelling at singing, architecture, composing, music, magic, ventriloquism and invention. Leroux, the author and narrator, describes him as having a huge heart and immense amounts of talent that unfortunately, due to rejection over his appearance, he ended up using for deceit and to prey upon others. Thus the author concludes by pitying and praying over the character in spite of his crimes, questioning why God would make someone that hideous in the first place.

[Information Found Wiki]
[Picture Found On Google]
Not Owned By Me, Not Mine