Mémoire et quête identitaire dans le roman Dora Bruder de Patrick Modiano
Memory and Identity Quest in Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder

Summary/Abstract: The present article aims to examine the tension between memory and forgetting in Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder (1997), an investigative novel that attempts to reconstruct the story of a Jewish teenager who disappeared during their deportation as well as the path of her flight through the Occupied Paris. First, I will analyze the means by which the narrator/author tries to rescue from oblivion this victim of History whose name appears in the first “Memorial to Jews Deported from France” published by Serge Klarsfeld in 1978: archival documents, a newspaper ad from 1941, letters, photographs, among others. Next, I will focus on the interconnection between History and autobiography. By evoking Dora’s story, the narrator/author delves into his own biography: he revisits his early youth connected to that of his heroine through the Parisian topography. Finally, I dwell on the fragmentation of the narrative whose discontinuity reflects the silences of History.

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