L’écriture autofictionnelle dans Livret de famille et Dora Bruder de Patrick Modiano

The work of Patrick Modiano is based on the research of origins and the desire to reconstitute a life. This quest for identity is inseparable from an autofictional style of writing that confers on his work a particular charm. This paper is based on Livret de famille and Dora Bruder to determine the distinctive features of this writing and to emphasize the important place of these two books. This study will focus on structure and recurrent themes. Livret de famille and Dora Bruder provide answers to understand the relations that exist between the quest of identity and the obsession of the past and to demonstrate the analogy between fiction and reality.
The analysis of these two books will allow us to identify the originality of Patrick Modiano’s writing. This style of writing, which oscillates between memory and oblivion, is an excellent weapon to struggle against the oblivion itself. It is also an effective means to release the weight of obsessive memories that always made him suffer. This style of writing is based on two stories that merge over the pages: One is autobiographical that relates the restructure of Modiano’s personal life and the other one is fictional where it is about invented stories concerning other fictional or real characters. In fact, Modiano offers us a new style of autofictional writing privileging the ambiguity and relying on the imaginary on one hand, and the autobiographic and historical realities on the other hand.