Abstract

By taking "three strong women" as heroines, Marie NDiaye brings out the paradoxical strength of characters caught up in the destructive mechanisms of stories with uncertain endings. We perceive in these women the models of a resilience whose restorative grace is inscribed the intersubjective relations of which they are the hearths. This hypothesis invites us to observe how these relationships, threatened by an alienating confusion, get out of it, but also to locate the opaque zones of the narratives which designate the fragility of the process. Resilience could be the faculty of escaping from the dead life, that which makes them know the reflex of the withdrawal on oneself for a preservation without other goal than to flee the suffering. By refusing to collude with the deadly exercise of violence, the protagonists restore in themselves the dignity of the human person, concentrated in the faculty of answering to oneself and to the other. As for the reader, he is provoked by the ambivalences of the narratives to a hermeneutic choice reflecting the existential choice of the characters: the question is posed to him of the confidence to grant – or to refuse – to an original goodness of the human being and of life.

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