Henri Thomas: écriture de guerre et silence créateur ou les sources de son identité narrative

Abstract

This study, dealing with narrative identity during the war in Henri Thomas’s epistolary discourse, implies the consideration of factors such as the awareness of his historical self. Such awareness locates him in the perspective of being a «story-man» that can be told in the discourse and become self-revealing, which situates us before a man liable to progress and for whom compromise is his only aim. This will be the material used during the first stage of the war (soldier Thomas), and it will later on become a spiritual compromise through which he searches for his salvation and his country’s, France. All this occurs thanks to the creative silence through which life, identity, and literary universe appear in perfect communion.