Flaubert's Style

A Simple Soul, by Gustave Flaubert, is a text where we can clearly see a style called Free Indirect Style, a style in which the writer is 3rd person omnicient narrator, that describes the emotions of a person without dialogue. In It, the author needs to characterizise, narrate and describe the character and his/ her feelings. Flaubert does this with ease. Felicite is described in a way that we can picture her almost perfectly, feel what she feels, her despair, her love, her emotions, and Flaubert not once specifies what she's feeling, just by the way she is described. Flaubert is very detailed in most of the writing, describing most of the context in which Felicite is in, what happens to her, etc. Another adjective very appropriate to this style is realistic. Flaubert pretty much tries to immitate what life was, how Madam Aubain treats badly Felicite, how she pretends to like her when she inside always thinks that she's lower class and ignorant. I myself have tried this style, and it's very hard to accomplish, because not evreyone has the capacity of making the reader feel the emotion of the character, like Flaubert can.

The Thoughts Of All Men

While I was reading Poem 17 of Walt Whitman's Leaves Of Grass, it started out as "These are the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands-". I thought of it very curious that a poem starts like that, Then i kept reading and at the end there was another line that caught my attention again, "This is the grass that grows wherever the land is, and the water is;/ this is the common air that bathes the globe." The poem talks about things like if its not as much yours as mine, then it is not the same. It was cool that the guy talked about his thoughts being the ones of all the world, and then comparing it to the grass, because the grass grows wherever there is land, and he says that these thoughts grow wherever there is people.

"These are the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands—they are not original with me;
If they are not yours as much as mine, they are nothing, or next to nothing;
If they are not the riddle, and the untying of the riddle, they are nothing;
If they are not just as close as they are distant, they are nothing.
This is the grass that grows wherever the land is, and the water is;
This is the common air that bathes the globe." Most of the poems talk about grass, this one is no exception. I wonder what does Whitman mean when he talks about the thoughts of all men. He says "they are not original with me;", which I am guessing makes reference to the fact that he is not the creator of the thoughts, he is just another individual man with the thought, another leaf of grass.