EN
The return of the theme of the Great War in literature imposes on the contemporary reader a double heritage: that of grief and guilt. The post‐ memory rediscovery of loss is therefore accompanied by a prise de conscience of forgetting or indifference, in family memory and History, in relation to war’s anonymous victims. In the fiction compared in this paper, Douze lettres au soldat inconnu by Olivier Barbarant and Visites aux vivants by Cathie Barreau, loss is thematized by deconstructing the specter of the Great War. The two authors attempt to libertate the specters from the aura of anxiety, on the one hand in the hope of taming the past, on the other to give voice, as well individual integrity, to the forgotten subjects of the Great War.