Nobel Prize Novelist Patrick Modiano’s Missing Person: A Man with Amnesia Searches for His Identity. Who is he?

The opening sentence is, “I am nothing” (1). Why does the main character say this, since he must be something, even if we don’t yet know what?

And it is hard take his search for his identity at face value. For when the story begins, he has already had amnesia for ten years, and the reader is not told what steps had been taken to discover his identity ten years ago, or why the search has not been pursued for the last ten years.

And the new search, the plot of this novel, is not even followed to its conclusion. It stops, arbitrarily, at some point, implying that finding this character’s true identity is not the novelist’s real concern.

So what is this novel about? Why did it win the 1978 Prix Goncourt in France? And why did Patrick Modiano just win the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature?

My interpretation is that the main character represents novelists. Modiano's insight is that looking for the novelist’s true identity is futile, because the novelist has no single true identity. To borrow a phrase from Walt Whitman, novelists contain multitudes. In the words of this blog, they have multiple personality, or, as I prefer, multiple identity, as in Multiple Identity Literary Theory.

Which brings me back to that first sentence, “I am nothing.” What is Modiano saying? What does he mean? The novelist is saying: “I am no (one) thing.”

1. Patrick Modiano. Missing Person [1978]. Translated from the French by Daniel Weissbort [1980]. Boston, Verba Mundi/David R. Godine, 2004/2014.