What is the author's perspective in the memoir, The Years (Ernaux)?

Ernaux writes generally from the first-person plural perspective, employing pronouns such as ‘we’ and ‘us,’ by which she places herself inside the text and acknowledges her own story as being a part – at the very least a part, at the most the entirety – of this book’s trajectory. Yet, by employing the plural of the first-person perspective, she simultaneously includes all of her own contemporaries in the perspective of the text. Therefore, she can write “We lived in a scarcity of everything, of objects, images, diversions, explanations of self and the world” (34) without it being entirely clear whether she speaks of her own experience in provincial France, of her entire generation’s experience, of her town’s experience, etc. She speaks on behalf of herself and those like her – that much is clear. Yet, there is another perspective which this book frequently employs and which, unlike the past tense associated with the collective and simultaneously personal and impersonal memories recounted in the first-person plural perspective, is usually associated with the present tense.

This perspective is the third-person female perspective, employing pronouns such as ‘she’ and ‘her’ to describe one particular woman prominently featured in every photograph described in this book. Though it later becomes clear that this woman is Ernaux, by analyzing snapshot moments through photographs Ernaux manages to remove herself from the identity of the woman in the pictures and speak about her as though she is reading her mind. She says, for example, “Maybe she does not perceive the gap that separates her from other girls in her class,” (50) analyzing the young woman from a distance as though unfamiliar with her personality. This lends an entirely impersonal air to every description of the woman’s thoughts, as though one were following a character in a novel. Ernaux thus escapes sentimental prose and fits in the woman’s story alongside the collective story symbolized by the pronoun ‘we.’