An Atypical Autobiography: W or the Memory of Childhood of Georges Perec

The French author Georges Perec, the son of a Polish Jew family who migrated to France before the Second World War, following the death of his father on the battleground and his mother at Auschwitz, wanted to get over his deeply felt loss of his sense of identity and memories by writing what he calls an autobiography, W or the memory of childhood, in 1975. Perec’s work is a marginal text that forces the limits of autobiographical mode in that it brings together the autobiographical chapters where he provides sections from his life, and the fictitious adventures he made up when a child concerning the life of a group of people interested only in the sports, in an islet in the country of fire. The aim of this article is to study the various aspects of Georges Perec’s work, to analyze the authentic narrative techniques, and to reveal the relation between the two seemingly separate texts on the basis of the theoretical works of Phillippe Lejeune that opened up new perspectives on autobiography as a genre.

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