ABSTRACT
Time and again, students, academics, and administrators are questioned about the value of studying literature and/or literature by women and/or literature written in French. Just as social connection unites many if not all of the aforementioned issues, family links narrator to her childhood and to her autobiographical narration of that past. Philippe Lejeune’s definition of the autobiographical pact as “a retrospective account in prose that a real person makes of his own existence stressing his individual life and especially the history of his personality” deserves study of the four delineated aspects. These are form of narration, subject, situation of the narrator, and the position of the latter. First entitled The Absolute Image, The Lover originally was designed to include actual photographs collected by Marguerite Duras’s son. In her Autobiographical Tightropes, Leah Hewitt stresses the importance of the “absolute image,” the imaginary photograph of the young girl’s meeting with le Chinois.
