M. Butterfly

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual content, antigay bias, racism, gender discrimination, emotional abuse, bullying, suicidal ideation, and death by suicide.

The play’s protagonist and primary narrator is Rene Gallimard, a 65-year-old French diplomat who was disgraced following a massive political scandal led to his incarceration. The extended flashbacks that make up the bulk of the play feature Gallimard in his forties and fifties. Gallimard is a farcical hero. His actions drive the plot but ultimately yield results that expose the absurdity of his motivations. Hwang’s intention is to compel the audience to listen to Gallimard’s story yet elicit little to no sympathy for him by the end of the play.

Gallimard is an unreliable narrator. At the start of Act I, Scene 3, he declares his intention to redeem his honor by telling his story in a way that gets the audience to understand what he did. He willfully omits parts of the truth—chiefly the truth of Song’s gender—from his storytelling, leaving it ambiguous whether he knew that Song was male early on or discovered it only during the court trial 20 years after their first meeting, as he publicly claims.