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tagonists only believes that his or her partner is lusting after someone else), Raoul pursues Marguerite in order to beat her. At this point Marguerite asks Raoul, clearly her adversary, to help her (obviously against himself).
The fabula is rather puzzling, and the reader does not know how to summarize it in terms of actantial roles. In fact, we have many actants: Subject and Object (fight); Sender and Receiver (call for help); Helper and Opponent (rescue). They are embodied in three roles, namely, Victim (the She-Hero), Villain, and Helper. But these three roles are manifested by only two actors, Raoul and Marguerite, and Raoul plays two irreducibly opposite roles, Helper and Villain.
As a matter of fact, Raoul (the Villain in reality) becomes the Helper only insofar as the propositional attitudes (wishes or beliefs) of Marguerite are concerned: Marguerite wants and/or believes Raoul to be her Helper. Her belief acquires a sort of performative value; she does things with words.
To symbolize what happens in this fabula in fabula, we can say that,
(i) given h as Helper and ~h as Villain (or non-Helper),
(ii) given Bm as 'Marguerite believes that', Km as 'Marguerite knows that', and Wm as 'Marguerite wants that',
the reader (after having discovered that Raoul is the Villain for Marguerite and that she asks him to be her Helper against himself) is led to the following tentative inference:
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Therefore Marguerite knows that she wants what is logically (or narratively) impossible. But since she wants it she believes that this contradiction is possible. However, this is not the only inference the reader can make. It is thinkable that Marguerite believes that by wanting something the impossible becomes possible. Or that she wants to make Raoul believe that the impossible is possible, and so on.
In this sense chapter 2 is a fabula in fabula. It not only anticipates the maze of objective contradictions through which the entire fabula will lead the reader, but also does what the reader himself is expected to do, that is, to transform his expectations (beliefs and desires) into actual states of the fabula.
By a careful reading of this chapter, the reader would be able to anticipate the whole course of the story, thus avoiding any mistake. But, as we have said, the theme of misunderstanding and logical incoherence is overwhelmed by the theme of adultery.

 
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