The Inexhaustible Search for Identity in Patrick Modiano s Select Novels

Abstract

The objective of this dissertation entitled, The Inexhaustible Search for Identity in Patrick Modiano s Select Novels is to explore the theme of identity in the select novels of Patrick Modiano. In other words, the purpose of this study is to throw light on how Patrick Modiano delineates the unending search for selfhood. The study also seeks to illustrate the quest for selfhood of those who suffered a fate similar to that of Modiano during World War II. His novels delve into the puzzle of identity, and he tries to trace evidences of existence through traces of the past. In Modiano s early novels the past is mostly the past of the Occupation. This connects his work to the Holocaust and the loss of a larger historical dimension. His recent works are concerned with the period of the narrator s childhood; loss becomes the absence or loss of the child s parents, or the loss or death of a child or younger brother, or the loss of his own self that intensifies the narrator s apparent uprootedness. His novels are replete with characters who are estranged from their parents. The imaginative transformation of his experience of parental dismissal is dramatic, evocative, and at times gruesome.