Silence in the works of Patrick Modiano

Abstract

The 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the French writer Patrick Modiano (b. 1945) for work that ‘uncovered the life-world of the Occupation’. The jury recognised the author’s significant role in addressing the heavy silences surrounding this uneasy period in French history. Modiano’s novels, however, are full of silences, the unsaid, and the unsayable. While his work is an indictment of certain sociohistorical silences, it is also a literature which performs, and is permeated by, a multitude of silences. This thesis seeks to elucidate the nature of this tension through an analysis of silence across twenty-seven of Modiano’s texts, from his first novel, La place de l’etoile (1968)..