Expressing Ethics through Word and Silence: Robert Merle’s La mort est mon métier

Abstract

Thanks to a daring and original exercise of focusing the narrative in first person, Robert Merle makes a historical Nazi the hero and narrator of his novel La mort est mon métier. Adding to this fact a careful choice of what is said and what is omitted, the author shows that the “final solution to the Jewish problem” by Hitler was not a massacre organized by some bloodthirsty or revengeful individuals, but a «hard task» accomplished by a group of de­humanized beings for whom the honor –and morals– consisted of total dedication to blind obe­dience to their superiors.