SOURCE: “Family Reflections and the Absence of the Father in Duras's ‘L'Amant,’” in Essays in French Literature, No. 26, November, 1989, pp. 98-109.

In the following essay, Hellerstein suggests that the father's death in The Lover “deprives all the members of the family of a source of emotional, economic, and sexual definition.”

The theme of absence plays a major role in Marguerite Duras's works, as has been shown by the studies of Carol Murphy and others.¹ L'Amant is no exception to this rule, and indeed Duras indicates the importance of the theme from the very beginning of the novel: her own identity appears as an unnameable void, and the family relations which form one of the major subjects of the book are described as “le lieu au seuil de quoi le silence commence”, a “mystère”, a “porte fermée”.² However, these family relations are not only a form of...