Autofictional strategies in Kim Thúy's Ru

The aim of this essay is to find signs of autofiction in the autobiographical novel Ru written by Kim Thúy. We also examine the functions of autofiction in the novel. What purpose can an autofictional strategy of writing serve?Autofiction is a literary term with many significations and that is why we have formulated our own definition of autofiction in this essay. The practice of autofiction is not new, it is in fact a historical category and we think that this shows the value of autofiction as a very human way of writing, and that this value is related to the human memory and to the wish to relate past events in a more vivid way. For exemple, a comparison can be made between the human memory and autofiction; both of them have pictures of own memories and also pictures of memories that someone else gave them. It is also possible that fiction and reality blend unconsciously when we call to mind events from the past.Ru is the first novel of Kim Thúy and it describes her and her family’s life during the Vietnam War, under the communist regime’s terror, as refugees and as immigrants in Canada. The author hop from present time to past time according to her memory. Ru does not have chapters, instead it is composed of many short stories which are linked togheter by a thought or a word. It is not an enumeration of events, places or numbers, in Ru it is the individual’s perspective that is in focus.We have analysed the autofiction in Ru according to the following points: écriture consonantique, littérarité, rétrospection dialectique, découpage temporal and reconstitution. In our analysis we have shown that there is autofiction in Ru. First of all because the novel is not written in a chronological order but also because it contains the authors search for her-self which is also a search for healing of traumatic experiences. We have also dicussed the functions of autofiction in Ru and we have seen that Kim Thúy insert stories of others which has a function for the collective history of the people of Vietnam. Kim Thúy uses fiction to make the readers imagine the real. In this way, fiction and reality are not opposed, it is just two different manners of talking about the real world