Flaubert`s Parrot is a massive lumber room of detail about the great man: in it we learn an enormous amount about his life, family, lovers, thought processes, health and obsessions. But the voice that tells us all of this is gradually revealed to be itself in the grip of an obsession. The voice is that Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired doctor with a nagging need to rationalize his wife`s suicide and a more obscure compulsion to anatomize the processes of human identity.