Internal dialogue as means of collective conflict resolution in Linda Lê's exile writing

In the work of the Vietnamese-Francophone writer, Linda Lê, war in the homeland causes personal conflict for fatherless daughters. Lacking the means to engage in intersubjective communication due to death, guilt over filial abandonment remains unresolvable in exile. In Lettre morte (1999) Lê's narrator seeks to remedy this impasse by generating a reconciliatory diatribe intended for a ghostly father figure, while the narrative form of internal dialogue is progressively developed in À l’enfant que je n’aurai pas (2011) and Lame de fond (2013) to deal with such familial discord. In imitating interpersonal communication by having narrators speak for and to the absent other, Lê seeks to resolve personal conflict through literary instances of collective reconciliation in her later exile narratives.