Living a agonizing dialectic between rejected values and proposed values, Alexander, the protagonist fights against the predicursive ethos of his community in order to reach a targeted ethos in order to restore his own and that of his entourage. Continually transgressing the collective values of his community, he places himself as an anti-values hero in a novel that is a digest of humanism, beauty, and melancholy whose reading generates an extreme sensation of literary pleasure.
But how is an ethos built, the purpose of which is to reposition the protagonist In the social field, to restore his tarnished and distorted image, and to gather his peers for a rehabilitation of their collective ethos? To what extent is this individual ethos in harmony with the collective ethos?  What are the discursive and argumentative procedures deployed by the protagonist to reveal his ethos and thus reach the targeted ethos?