Narration and Postmemory in a graphic novel: the example of Petit-fils d'Algérie by Joël Alessandra

Abstract

How do narrative processes serve the post-memorial project of the actorialized narrator? This is what we propose to examine here, based on a study of Joël Alessandra's Petit-fils d'Algérie, in which the author, who set out in the footsteps of his ancestors, recounts his trip to Algeria in 2014. This graphic novel has a complex narrative structure, with several narrators, temporal shifts and a great importance attached to the story’s setting. Drawing on the definition of post-memory as an indirect memory of the facts (Howell, 2015) and on the narratology of comics (Groensteen 1999, 2011, 2021), this article examines the close links between narrative processes, their visualisation and the construction of a personal memory which thereby becomes transmissible, before leading to a rapprochement with the notion of the "post-memorial subject" (Fevry, 2018).