The present study explores how three authors of different geographical and social origin, race, sex and culture, approach the problem of narrating autobiographically the elusive part of their pasts which is childhood. It focuses on the stylistic and narrative strategies used by Maria Wine in Man har skjutit ett lejon [On a tiré sur un lion, my translation], Patrick Chamoiseau in Antan d'enfance and Chemin d'école, and Nathalie Sarraute in Enfance.
In Chapter 1, the metaphorical image of the author as a caged lion informs the reading of Wine's autobiography. Through different images of prison - the orphanage, the family, the name, the body - this global metaphor expresses her problematic relation to the world, the others and the self. The stylistic features used to describe the child's universe from her perspective, convey her entrapment and liberation through metaphor and metamorphosis. Finally, I argue that Wine inscribes, metaphorically, a certain poetics within the narrative, which allows to grasp a poetic vision of existence.
Chapter 2 studies Chamoiseau's use of partly ethnographical methods to depict and preserve the creole world of his childhood. The oral dimension introduced in the writing, and the myth of paradise and hell which serves to establish a contrast between home and colonial school, dominate the investigation. The child's play with words and lies reveals a conception of the autobiographical project.
Chapter 3 discusses how Sarraute conveys her childhood experience through the use of the meta-narrative device of a double narrative voice, as well as the role of images and space in the process of remembering. I suggest different ways of reading the work as an anti-literary vocation narrative, as well as a manifesto for a poetics of autobiography through the use of tropisms.
In the concluding remarks, the comparative discussion of the three writers brings out common traits in their responses to the problematic of writing childhood, while underlining that the formulation of a poetics within the autobiography, a shared feature of all three texts, allows the authors to create a meta-commentary on what writing is or can be, inside or outside the autobiographical realm.