In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith Asserts: “The division of labour…occasions, in every art, a proportionable increase of the productive powers of labor…What is the work of one man in a rude state of society, being generally that of several inn an improved one.” The novel of the nineteenth-, twentieth-century describes the rise and fall of protagonist as a function of their economic situation. Denis, the protagonist of the novel Au Bonheur des Dames by Emile Zola becomes prominent because she undertakes at a job at a department store while Lucien de Rubempre, the protagonist of Balzac’s Lost Illusions plans to commit suicide because he lost his fortunes and his family cannot help him pay his debts. Bel-Ami, the protagonist of Maupassant’s novel by the same name, also reaches the peak of Parisian social life only after he elopes with the daughter of a tycoon and forces her family to have them married. Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima collaborates with a revolutionary underground in order to spread communism in the world and Razumov, Joseph Conrad’s protagonist in Under Western Eyes, acts as a Russian agent in a revolutionary cell in Switzerland. How does money force the protagonist to think and act? What is the relation between the protagonist’s financial situation and her/his ability to become self-fulfilled in life trough achieving fantasies and through social success? What are the economic and social changes that society undergoes in the nineteenth and early twentieth century which are so radical that in these changes the roots of the narratives of the novels that we will study are sunk? In order to reply to these questions we will read theoretical and philosophical texts as well.