Old Goriot is a complex work of art which seeks to represent the complexity of life. In this introductory study I will necessarily simplify Balzac's novel to some degree by explaining and discussing separately features which are woven into each other in the text itself. My aim is not to replicate the impact of Old Goriot, but to provide the modern reader with information which will help him or her to understand how complex Balzac's novel is. In Chapter 1, I deal principally with the processes which lead to the final shape and material of Old Goriot; Chapter 2 is concerned mainly with looking at four related aspects of what the novel achieves.

Balzac's novels have ceased to be easy texts for modern readers to understand and enjoy without effort. Because its action is in a social, historical, and geographical setting which was intended to be familiar to its original audience but is now dead and gone, Old Goriot presupposes a certain amount of knowledge which modern readers, by and large, do not have. Balzac's particular way of combining fact with fiction, descriptions of settings with character analyses, individual life with social environment, has had an enormous impact on the subsequent course of the European novel, and as a consequence on our own general expectations of what novels should be like, so that it is hard for us to perceive, let alone enjoy, the novelty and inventiveness of Old Goriot.