About Benjamin: The Rage to Live

This article is based on a book by Pierre Solié relating the evolution of Benjamin, an adolescent, which serves as a study of the conflicts common to every adolescence: separations, rivalries, and encounters with the opposite sex. However, since the novel is set during the Second World War, the adolescent’s initiation process is accompanied, in this case, by the presence of death, both real and symbolic. The author thus particularly emphasizes the role and function of the archetypes in such circumstances, as well as the importance of the reactivation of the hero myth, which this adolescent cannot evade.