An Analysis of the Narrative Techniques in I. Némirovsky’s Suite Française

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Different Styles, Same War :

Comparative Analysis of the First Chapter in

Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française 

Class:                 Class 6

Student:                 朱佳铭 Zhu Jiaming

Student ID:         1500015836

Department:        Guanghua School of Management

Email:                 zjm@pku.edu.cn

                Contents

Abstract        2

Key word        3

Part1. Introduction and background information        3

Part2. Analysis on stylistic features        4

Part3. Analysis on writing techniques        7

Part4. Analysis on views of war        10

Reference        12

Attachment        13

Abstract

This thesis is intended to appreciate the war novel by making an analyst of the first chapter in Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française in realistic angle compared with the first chapter in another French novel, Le Clézio’s La Guerre in postmodern angle to find out some differences between realism and postmodernism. Though both are war novels and written by French novelist, in the comparative analysis, these two novels have noticeable differences in stylistic features, writing techniques and views of war. About stylistic features, Irène Némirovsky narrates Parisians’ reaction to an air raid in detail while the war in Le Clézio’s pen seems impersonal and his tone is distant and impartial. About writing techniques, Suite Française concentrates on the outside-inside description, parallelism and vivid rhetorical figures while La Guerre focus on casually fractional short sentences, clear logical structure and bold but abstract rhetorical figures. About view of wars, the first novel is relatively more compassionate and optimistic while the second one is desperate and condemned.

Key word

War novel   Realism   Postmodernism   Comparative analysis

Part1. Introduction and background information

As an important theme of modern novels, war is an organized and often prolonged conflict bore with the birth of human society. War novels examine, describe and interpret war aesthetically. However, as a form of literature, war novel is not a simple mechanical description, repetition and reproduction of war. Many authors focus on revealing people’s living condition and destiny in their war novels. From the linguistic criticism angle，the appreciation of war novels can be divided into two aspects that the first aspect is about the literary expression of language, text, rhetoric, writing techniques and literary style, and the second aspect is about the view of war conveyed by the novel. While the former is relatively objective and have some non-utilitarian features, the latter is inevitably subjective and utilitarian has to some extent.

Obviously, both as a main genre in modern literature, realism and postmodernism have deep and significant influence on war novels.

Realism literary is part of the realist art movement beginning with mid nineteenth-century French literature (Stendhal), Russian literature (A.S. Pushkin) and extending to the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century. Literary realism, in contrast to idealism, attempts to represent familiar things as they are.^[1] Realist authors chose to depict everyday and banal activities and experiences, instead of using a romanticized or similarly stylized presentation.

Postmodern literature is literature characterized by reliance on narrative techniques such as fragmentation, paradox, and the unreliable narrator; and often is (though not exclusively) defined as a style or a trend which emerged in the post–World War II era. Postmodern works are seen as a response against Enlightenment thinking and Modernist approaches to literature.^[2] Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, tends to resist definition or classification as a "movement". Indeed, the convergence of postmodern literature with various modes of critical theory, particularly reader-response and deconstructionist approaches.^[3]

As a representative of realistic war novel, Suite française is the title of a planned sequence of five novels by Irène Némirovsky, a French writer of Ukrainian Jewish origin. In July 1942, having just completed the first two of the series, Némirovsky was arrested as a Jew and detained at Pithiviers and then Auschwitz, where she died. The notebook containing the two novels was preserved by her daughters but not examined until 1998. They were published in a single volume entitled Suite française in 2004. While, as a representative of postmodern war novel，La Guerre is a novel written by French Nobel laureate writer J. M. G. Le Clézio in 1970 and translated into English as War by Simon Watson Taylor.

This thesis is followed by three parts. I would like to analysis the first chapter in Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française and Le Clézio’s La Guerre (War) on their stylistic features, writing techniques and views of war in turn. From the comparison between the two novels, we can have a clear view of how realism and postmodernism have influence on war novels.

Part2. Analysis on stylistic features

Both war literature, Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française and Le Clézio’s La Guerre (War) show some universal characters of war: despite their durations and locations, initiations and terminations, wars are always destructive, traumatic and hateful. The two authors, however, are disparate in their approaches to demonstrating these characters.

As a realistic war novel, Irène Némirovsky narrates Parisians’ reaction to an air raid in detail. Including Parisians of different conditions such as different social standings, sexes and ages, her subjects are quite comprehensive. By describing their respective behaviors and mental activities in the air raid, Némirovsky emphasizes that people still have their own distinctiveness during the overwhelming war. Concerned with people, especially civilians, in war, she indirectly comments on war through showing how it has affected people’s lives. On the other hand, the excerpt of La Guerre has no specific narrative. There is no detailed information about when and where the war is taking place. Nor is there any specific figure or any event in the war. Just as Le Clézio writes, “It is not an accident. It is not an event. It is war. ” This remark seems to suggest that war is so special that none of its elements—people, locations and all else—actually matters; instead, the war’s own being explains them all. His tone distant and impartial, the war in Le Clézio’s pen seems impersonal. Interestingly, while people play a crucial role in the first work but are almost absent in the second, both excerpts have the sense of “jadedness”. In Suite Française this jadedness lies in people’s attitude towards the air raid and war in general. In reaction to the air raid, the Parisians appear astonishingly calm and even slightly numb. On the other hand, the style in La Guerre is jaded. Although the author is describing gruesome images, his tone is more objective than sympathetic. In both cases, the sense of jadedness arguably shows the authors’ commentaries on war and heightens people’s awareness of its terror.