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She was hospitalized, and with the help of her close companion, Yann Andrea, she stopped drinking and recovered for a time. She had been an alcoholic most of her life, and it began to imperil her health. When Duras set out to write The Lover in 1983, she was recovering from a near brush with death. This essay explores the ways Duras's narrative voices reveal or enact the process of growth and mourning and how these concepts are inextricably bound together and mutually generating in her text. (1) Though a time of loss, Duras also recreates it as the original context for developing her creative imagination, her ability to relate to others outside her family, and to experience differentiation and sexuality, which all help her transition towards an adult identity. Her increased independence coincides with discovering she wants to be a writer, a vocation which provides her the means to frequently revisit this period of trauma and loss in her oeuvre. In this portrait of her development as an adolescent, Duras chronicles her growing capacity to grieve as she tells of individuating herself from her anguished family.
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Psychoanalyst Henry Krystal describes adolescence as a transition into adulthood and a time when an individual develops the ability to grieve (63). Her recreation of what she has lost with frequent references to death suggest a process of remembering and mourning in her writing. The novel chronicles loss [of family, innocence, a great love), mourning and discovery. They are intertwined in ways that suggest equally that as the artist recreates the teen Duras, the latter has given birth to the voice of the artist. Though the "older" voice gives perspective and shapes the representation of the youthful self, this is not simply a dialogue or contrast between youth and age. Marguerite Duras's The Lover, a fictionalized memoir of her troubled adolescence in Indochina, is narrated from the points of view of age and youth.