Responses to Appeals for Help and Retrospective Narration in Isabelle Müller’s Daughter of the Phoenix

This article examines responses to signals of seeking help and the evaluation of those who offer help in Isabelle Müller’s Daughter of the Phoenix. Drawing on Smith and Watson’s distinction between the narrating “I” and the narrated “I” and their account of relationality in life writing, it offers close readings of dialogue, unspoken thoughts, interventions, and passages that revisit earlier events. The analysis shows how a wish to confide can be interpreted in other terms, while intervention has occurred without ending the perpetrator’s control. Retrospective narration gives readers access to information unavailable to listeners within a scene. When the drawing reappears years later, or an expression of gratitude is recalled after a death, relationships of support emerge across different moments, with disappointment and gratitude coexisting. The article examines how the distribution of information and the revisiting of earlier scenes shape these evaluations. Its findings are limited to passages checked in the Vietnamese translation. Additional information is not treated as evidence that the narrator has changed her judgment, nor is the act of recounting the past taken as proof of healing.