General Overwiev of Modiano’s Novel Out of The Dark in The Light of Concepts: “Memory” and “Time”

Peter Englund, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, who gave the Nobel Prize in Literature to Patrick Modiano in 2014 explained that Modiano is an ingenious practitioner of the art of memory and he was granted the award “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.” Out of the Dark (Du plus loin de l’oubli), which is one of the examples of his works where he displays the art of memory, is narrated to the readers as a passionate and unfinished love adventure that he had during his youth. The writer, who is also the narrator of the novel, leaps back to the time when he was happy, from the present time when he was unhappy with the help of memory technique. The aim of this study is to examine Modiano’s Out of the Dark by means of French Psychologist and Theoretician Henri-Louis Bergson’s theories of matter and memory (et mémoire) and the concepts of time and duration (temps et durée) in the method of Structuralist Criticism and to come to a literary conclusion