Thus, he successfully faced his troubled past and he went through the process of healing his bettered and fragmented sense of self. Mauriac achieved catharsis by creating – and identifying with – fictional people going through painful experiences similar to his own. The article contends that the author got ' emotional closure ' by creating characters, who, just like him, suffered and almost suffocated at the hands of their own relatives.

This analysis does not mean to suggest that Mauriac was a misanthropist (or a misogynist for that matter, as the majority of his literary characters are females) or that he found pleasure in his characters' suffering. Mauriac infused his personal anguish into his fictions, but the question is whether his re-tributive stance towards his family lead to some form of catharsis.

His literature can be read as an attempt to heal a psychic wound caused by his family background. It has been argued that the author's gloomy depiction of the family was directly related to his own upbringing. Francois Mauriac died in 1970.This article analyses the recurrent and overarching themes of hatred and silence in François Mauriac's fiction. Mauriac's complete works were published in twelve volumes between 19. His most recent work has been a study of Charles de Gaulle (1964). Other outstanding novels are THÉRÉSE DESQUEYROUX (1927) (Thérès), LE NOEUD DE VIPÉRES (1932) (The Knot of Viper), LA FIN DE LA NUIT (1935) (The End of the Night), and LA PHARISIENNE (1941) (A Woman of the Pharisees). For instance, LE DESERT DE L’AMOUR (1925) (The Desert of Love) portrays the triangle of a woman and her would-be lovers, father and son, whose «unused» passion, an illusion of escape, turns into the desert in whose isolation the characters live their frustrated lives. The «religious» novels of Mauriac have been a puzzle to many critics, for they abound in evidences of the «dark side of life», and their religious content is not directly apparent. He is also a distinguished journalist and has been an editorial writer for FIGARO. Apart from his many novels, Mauriac has published several plays which have been produced by the Comédie Française. After the war de Gaulle made Mauriac a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour. During the Second World War he lived in occupied territory, at his estate in Malagar and in Paris, and published LE CAHIER NOIR (The Black Notebook) under the pseudonym Forez.

In 1933, he was elected to the Académie Française. LES MAINSJOINTES (Clasped Hands), a collection of poems that appeared in 1909, aroused some interest, but it was not until the publication of LE BAISER AUX LEPREUX (1922) (A Kiss for the Leper) that Mauriac became famous. He studied literature at Bordeaux and Paris but soon became an independent writer.

La Fin de la nuit by François Mauriac