The ol' switcheroo (Michael Reschke)

I think the reason Song starts narrating the play instead of Gallimard at the end of the second act is to signify another switch.

At the beginning of the play Gallimard introduces the audience to his favorite opera, Madame Butterfly. Gallimard and Marc act out some of the opera. Gallimard plays Pinkerton, the white man from the western world that Madame Butterfly falls in love with. In the opera, Pinkerton leaves and never returns and Butterfly becomes so heartbroken when she realizes her western man won’t return she kills herself. Gallimard likes to think of himself as Pinkerton, and when he meets Song, he believes she is his Butterfly.

What actually happens to Gallimard is that instead of really falling in love with Song, he falls in love with the fantasy he’s living. When Song strips in scene two of act three and proves without a doubt to Gallimard that he is a man, Gallimard says, “You showed me your true self. When all I loved was the lie,” (89).

In scene three Hwang makes it clear that Gallimard wasn’t Pinkerton, he was actually Butterfly. According to stage directions Gallimard picks up Song’s Kimono and he “makes up” his face. He puts on the Butterfly wig and the kimono and then, “turns upstage and plunges the knife into his body,” (93).

After Gallimard kills himself Song is seen standing “as a man,” (93). Song smokes a cigarette, which seems to suggest indifference to Gallimard’s death.

This role reversal seems to suggest that everything that was said about Asians in this play is actually referring to people of the west. The play ends with Gallimard, who is representative of the west, is last seen on the ground in women’s clothing, defeated. Song, who represents the east, stands “as a man” having done the job he set out do to.

Hwang explains this best in the afterword: “the Frenchman fantasizes that he is Pinkerton and his lover is Butterfly. By the end of the piece, he realizes that is is he who has been Butterfly, in that the Frenchman has been duped by love; the Chinese spy, who exploited that love, is therefore the real Pinkerton.”