Dora Bruder: The Hybrid Literary Work of Patrick Modiano

Abstract

This article studies the literary work of Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano, a French Nobel Prize winner in Literature. This work presents a search for the life story of a girl named Dora Bruder, who disappeared in 1941 during World War II from the perspective of the narrator who accidently found a missing person notice in 1988. The efforts of the narrator to find Dora’s life story enables him to discover historical information on which he bases his assumptions, and this information becomes foundational for making an imaginative link to Dora Bruder 47 years later. These efforts allow him to ruminate on his personal memories and to imbed his own life story into the narrative, where readers who follow Modiano’s works or know his biography can recognize that the narrator is, in fact, Modiano himself. It was found that Dora Bruder is a hybrid literary work that can be divided into 2 levels. At the first level, Modiano brings together four types of literary genre: detective, historical, biographical, and autobiographical. At the second level, he mixes factual narrative and fiction. The combination of these two levels also clearly shows that this work cannot be classified into one single genre.