La quête identitaire du narrateur de Patrick Modiano en rupture avec les attentes habituelles du lecteur
Patrick Modiano’s Narrator Search for Identity at Odds with the Reader’s Common Expectations

Summary/Abstract: This paper intends to read – interpret Patrick Modiano’s novel Accident nocturne (Nocturnal accident) from the perspective of the narrator’s quest for identity – a prevailing theme in Modiano’s novels – and, in this context, to discover some linguistic marks which deny the common expectations, or intrigue a reader still unfamiliar with Modiano’s writings. The marks to be identified are obviously connected to the anonymous ego who implicitly refuses to give satisfaction to the pre-existent models, with their construction mechanisms, ideas or images, despite the provisional borrowing of their way, all this deceiving the reader’s horizon of narrative expectations. On the other hand, the identity investigation of this fictional ego does not finally bring any clear light on what he used to be and, jointly, on what defines him. This investigation creates in return a space “between” (the obedience to the narrative paradigms and the refusal of them, the past and the present, the imaginary events and the factual ones …), which encourages the ideological, psychological or discourse differences, and so prepares many surprises which are revealed not only by the enunciation scene and the story scene, but also by the modes of their interaction.

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