SOURCE: Johnson, Warren. “The Dialogic Self: Language and Identity in Annie Ernaux.” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 23, no. 2 (summer 1999): 297-314.

In the following essay, Johnson argues that Ernaux's narrative style is a projection of her personal identity and comments that, throughout her oeuvre, “Ernaux traces the coming into being of a female speaking subject, buffeted by the currents of contending discourses against which she struggles to define herself.”

For the ten-year-old Denise Lesur of Ernaux's first book, Les armoires vides (Cleaned Out [literally, The Empty Wardrobes], 1974), a voracious reader of escapist romances, the stories she devours betray no authorial mediation. Giving free flight to her imagination, these texts, through their illusion of perfect transparency, offer a gateway to a solidly bourgeois world of businessmen and housewives that contrasts with the socially marginal milieu of her parents, proprietors of a café-grocery. The fictions she reads at home separate...