The End of the First Love...Marguerite Duras’s The Lover

Abstract

This article attempts to analyze love as one of the major themes in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover and to examine the writing techniques she uses in her novel. The Lover captures the protagonist narrator’s memories of her life as a French turning 16 who lived in Vietnam during the colonial period. The narrator recalled those days when she met a Chinese man with whom she later had a love affair. Recollecting the past enables her not only to reminisce about the first love but also to reconsider her feelings towards, and relationships with, her family members: mother, elder brother and younger brother. She also revealed herself and her dream to become a writer. Love can thus be analyzed from different perspectives which include a variety of the narrator’s relationships with other people in her life.
In terms of the writing techniques Marguerite Duras uses in her novel, the narrative is non-chronological and elliptical, hence being enigmatic to readers. The author employs the first-person pronoun “I” as well as the third-person one “she” and also keeps the narrator nameless, thereby resulting in ambiguity between fact and fiction. The strategy of switching the pronouns used from “I” to “she” creates the narrative distance of author, narrator and protagonist, and adds a sense of the past to the narrative. Incidents and spatio-temporal dimensions in the novel correspond with some details in the autobiography of the French author who spent her youth in Vietnam during the colonial times.