The functioning of vous

perspective and perception in La modification by Michel Butor

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss the impact of the French personal pronoun vous, on the narrative La Modification, by Michel Butor. The novel, to various extents, takes an experimental character, by means of the use of distinctive tenses and moods as well as the aforementioned pronoun, which, within Léon Delmont’s universe, turns into a dialogue with himself and the others. To achieve that, we must bear in mind the difference between “enunciation” and “utterance”, according to Paul Ricoeur (Tempo e narrativa, 1995), with regard to the divergence between the manner the story is effectively narrated and how it was in fact experienced, once each one of them will feature two subjects who dialogue. Françoise Rossum-Guyon (Critique du roman: Essai sur “La Modification” de Michel Butor, 1970) posits that the difference results in another ambiguity, because the narrator may either be a reflective consciousness and a non-reflective consciousness, there is not, however, a clear distinction between both of them, on the sense that they interfere on one another. Finally, we intend to investigate the mood of je on discourse, which results in the aforementioned impacts.