Childhood Memories or the Fundamentals of Narrating from the viewpoint of Anatole France

In order to appreciate the secrets of Anatole France's literary creativity in his stories, we must first attempt to acknowledge this great author himself. Some of his literary works, which deserve rereading, have fallen out of favor due to the predispositions of many other authors; however, re-publication of his works altogether in a collection called Pléiade and the adaptation of some of his works for films brought his works once again to the center of our attention. To avoid verbosity, we have limited our study on his stories to the first section of one of his works called Le livre de mon ami which entails six stories. All these stories depict the author's childhood memories which cannot be constrained to a specific time period. Each story is a discontinuous account, i.e. it is by no means related to its preceding and following accounts, and has concentrated only on one adventure and one event. Perhaps this discontinuity has resulted from oblivion. In his stories we are not encountered with fictitious events, rather we are faced with some authentic events and humorous tinctures which are described and interpreted by the author after the passage of a lengthy period of time. The stories of Anatole France recount events and then analyze their details along a short but precise route. Though strange to the readers, these events have not resulted from the author's imagination, rather they are events which vividly represent themselves to us as realities. This miscellany of stories takes us step by step on a trip whose recounting is so much distant from its actual occurrence both in terms of time and place. This time and place are then reconstructed according to the author's memories which are emblazoned with pleasant somberness.