Multiple Identities Of The Hero In Patrick Modiano's La Place De L'étoile

Identity is an important theme of Patrick Modiano's novels,roles in Modiano's novels always have multiple identities,and these identities are changing all the time.Under these multiple identities,roles in the novels lost their nature.As a result,Modiano's concept of identity premised on the basis of denials of definiteness and essence,this concept is intimately connected with western subject knowledge in Twentieth Century.La Place de l'étoile is first novel of Patrick Modiano,it's also his classic masterpiece and the classic script to explain Modiano's concept of identity.This study makes a thorough inquiry of the multiple identities of the hero in La Place de l'étoile,by which we can know more details about the basic identity view of Patrick Modiano.Specifically,The first three chapters analyze the multiplicity and fictionality of hero's identities.the last chapter analyzes Modiano's concept of identity and cause of it by the hero's attitude towards his identities.This study explores the multiple identities of the hero from the following aspects:Firstly,the Jewish identity of the hero.The hero's most conspicuous identity is Jewish.Jewish is a classic label in western world.This chapter analyzes the formation of Jewish identity,including Jewish under Anti-semitism cultural and Jewish under the context of sympathy,and Jewish as an extreme racism.By these analyses,we know that the hero's Jewish identities is not stable,but formed in long history.Secondly,the intellectual identity of the hero.The hero's second identity is the intellectual identity,including intellectual as writer and editor.This chapter analyzes formation of the intellectual identity and editor identity in order to expose fictionality of identity.The hero is a writer,but his creation isn't original,it's comes from other writers such as Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka.And what he is called as an editor comes from the editing job he devoted.Thirdly,identity of son.This is the third identity of the hero and which comes from father-son relationships.Father was defined in physiology and culture.on one hand,the hero is a compliant son to his father.On theother hand,he is a traitorous son who wants to kill his father and break tradition.Both the attitudes of compliant and traitorous are comes from the culture.Finally,the hero's identical view and Modiano's identical view.The hero banters his identities as he knows fictionality of identity,that's proves he is an anti-essentialism.He doesn't accept any identity,but takes them as cloth and changes them by what him want.The hero's attitude towards identity reflects Modiano's concept of identity,which connected closely to the concept of subject of European in Twentieth Century and writer's experience of life.