Character Analysis Of Missing Person By Patrick Mo Fitzgeraldo

Missing Person by Patrick Modiano tells a story of Guy, a detective who lose his memories ten years ago, and who tries to rebuild his identity by finding out his past. However, Through his searching for his past memories to rebuild his identity, Guy finds out that his losing identity can never be retrieved. Most of Guy’s searchings for his past memories were at night. The image of night, which could evoked the feelings of insecure and uncertainty, revealed the point that his past memories was not something visible and clear, but instead, they were uncertain and might had already disappeared. One of the most representative scene about the night was when Guy followed a man to his house in order to ask something about his ex-wife Gay, who may …show more content…
However, Parents, who were commonly thought as symbols of originality and nurture, were only mentioned twice in the whole story of missing person. The first time when parents appeared was when Jockey told Pedro about his childhood: “The day your father came to fetch two of you by car… He let Freddie drive, though he didn’t have a license yet… you told me the story at least a hundred time.”(Page 130) From the conversation above, it could be inferred that his father at least had existed and had some degrees of importance in his childhood, as he had mentioned him “at least a hundred time”. However, when Guy found out a trance about his father, which meant his originality and nurture, he only left one sentence to describe his inner thinking: “So I had had a father who come to fetch me at ‘Luiza school’. An interesting piece of information”(Page 130) The word “interesting” was a huge understatement since it was crucial to understand his original in order to retrieve his identity. Further, although he described this piece of information as “interesting”, Guy quickly changed the subject of his questioning without further digging of information about his father. Therefore, the word “interesting” was less of a heartfelt emotion but more of an irony. This attitude toward the information contrasted sharply with “you at least tell the story a hundred times” It could be seen that there was a huge gap between his new self and what he used to be. As the story was approaching an end, he still couldn’t find back his old identity even after he gathered so much information. It appeared that he may not be capable of finding back his identity, at least in this story. As the second and the last time he talked about his father, he saids: “And I tried to imagine what he might have looked like, that man who came for us on one of the days out, who left his car and walked toward us, who was