The reader is reduced to just another narrative layer in the novel, struggling to understand the supernatural elements occurring around them. Calling into question the death of Ieshua in the epilogue, which initially appeared certain, challenges not only the reader’s ability to interpret the text, but also the motivations and morals of Pontius Pilate. These juxtaposing narratives, are a clear example of Bulgakov enlisting ambiguity in order to subvert the reader’s expectations. However in the epilogue composed of a triptych of Bezdomny’s dreams, Ieshua lies, tarnishing his reputation as eternally good, and states that the crucifixion never happened in order to liberate Pilate from the persistent guilt that he was responsible for the death of an innocent man. In the first crucifixion in Chapter 16 Ieshua, in refusing to swear that he didn’t incite anyone to destroy the temple, dies for the truth and is executed, and Pilate is the cold heartless authority behind this. The chapters are presented through the reactions of the characters in the Moscow level of the narrative and as a result the outcome of the crucifixion of Ieshua loses certainty as the novel progresses.
The insertion of the Pontius Pilate chapters into the novel’s narrative provides the basis of the philosophical debate surrounding good and evil in the novel. This cacophony of voices becomes disorientating and allows Bulgakov to disrupt the temporal and spatial timeline of the novel. As Pierce suggests, the narration of this novel is shared between a combination of various subjective skaz narrators mixed with an omniscient objective narrator. The clear links between these narratives allows for a high level of intricacy in the novel’s plot, yet each narrative layer is distinctive, with varying narrative voices. They are inherently connected: the Jerusalem sections are presented as the Master’s novel, and the supernatural events are interwoven within the everyday in Moscow. It is generally accepted that the novel has 3 plot levels: the everyday Moscow life, the fantastic or supernatural Moscow level, and the historical Pontius Pilate chapters.
Unravelling this novel seems equally as complicated as I imagine constructing it in the first place would have been. Furthermore, the supernatural elements of this novel render death ambiguous in this absurd cosmic world nothing seems certain and endings no longer have their sense of finality. This structure provides the perfect setting for the novel’s central philosophical debate: the question of good and evil, a binary that was becoming increasingly less plausible in 1930s Stalinist Russia.
Firstly the narrative structure of this text lends itself to establishing ambiguity: a combination of several opposing spatiotemporal narrative planes, from Jerusalem to an unfamiliar Moscow. Widely considered to be a true masterpiece of 20 th century Russian literature, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita continues to divide critics, who incessantly search for its elusive meaning, whilst confronted with an ambiguity that penetrates deep into the core of this multi-textured and complex narrative.
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