All of Modiano's eighteen novels to date, except for one, are narrated in the first person. It is always the same kind of first person: tall, dark, reserved and slightly bumbling, he is also always engaged in a search for something in the past, either his own or someone else's. He is the likeable if rather underconfident guide who takes the reader through the plot and on this search, which also always ends in relative failure.

However, this Modiano narrator is as mysterious as he is familiar. In spite of speaking in the first person, he never reveals much of himself. The first-person voice is usually a personal, confidential one, quickly intimate with the reader, as we know from the confessional novel, the autobiographical novel, or the ‘deluded narrator’ novel. By contrast, Modiano's narrator is reticence itself. He does not take up the narrator's privilege and monopolise our attention, always preferring to talk about or listen to someone else. The narrative, although his own, is not coloured by his psychology: although it never sounds as impersonal as that of Camus' L'Etranger, Modiano's first-person narrative is paradoxically neutral and character-free. In this chapter I propose to investigate this first-person narrator, one who seems to speak as an ‘I’ but not of it. This peculiarity is inseparable from the quest for self-identity which is the driving force behind his narratives.

THEORIES OF THE NARRATOR

What, or who, is the narrator? One definition is simply that the narrator is he/she who tells the story: ‘the one who narrates, as inscribed in the text’. Gérard Genette, in ‘Discours du récit', finds this definition simplistic: he dissects the narrator into ‘point of view’ and ‘narrative voice’, and he claims that theorists have too often failed to notice the difference between he who sees, and he who speaks.