Abstract EN:

Albert modiano having not registered himself as a jew, in 1941, was arrested and taken to the depot, an annexe of drancy, and freed by a french gestapo. But was it not for this event, sym- bolic of the ambiguities of the occupation, would patrick modiano have had the desire to become a genuine french writer ? this thesis takes into consideration all of modiano's published works. There are several approaches : literary, historic, sociocultural, psychoanalytic. The study contains three parts which concern the two ideas 'image' and 'pere'. The first part approaches the different types of paternity which are : parent, social father, surrogate and mentor, showing their social, psychological and sym- bolic importance. The second part focuses on albert modiano. Firstly, the thesis tries to recreate al- bert modiano's biography, which is made difficult by patrick modiano's use of fiction ; then, it deals with his father's multitude of 'doubles'. The 'person' becomes a 'character' whose image develops through the fictional parts of his works. The personal myth arises from the haunting metaphors, as a result his works have partly become a 'tombeau'. Finally, the authorship answers our question : mo- diano wanted to reply to the anti-semites and to give himself a cultural identity. Biographical elements and intertextualities were brought together to create modiano's recurrent themes of guilt, disappearance, the contradiction between forgetting and remembering in a very nostalgic way. His self-portraits reveal his profound purpose : to be a warden of memories and to erect a memorial for all those unknown in history whose traces time will erase. Has he exorcised the memory of his father ?