Sante's Resume

Luc Santé's Resume is a personal account of cultural and socio-economical changes throughout Europe during the mid 20th century, and how they potentially correlated to impact his life. Resume consists of nine different life summaries, each with introductory constants (Luc Santé birth details, Lucien Santé's work history), before an opposing tale is expressed to conclude each paragraph. These vary in positive and negative connotations, but the concluding argument Santé's work puts forth aligns with the cliché that 'every action has a reaction'. In essence, one slight tweak in his life, or resume, starts a chain effect that differs each life from one another. Santé constructs his own identity foremost, but also the identities of his parents to a lesser extent, and does so using various literary techniques. Repetition is the most prominent technique throughout, both in sentencing and theme, but techniques such as formal register and tone allow Santé to swing between personal and impersonal modes of address, which challenges the reader to make their own assumptions of what Santé is implying.

The repetition of each paragraph's opening statement in Resume helps to create Santé's identity as a calculated individual, in which his movements are highly calculated. Each starts with two pieces of information, for the most part identical and very rarely opposing, and are divulged along the lines of "I was born in 1954 in Verviers, Belgium, the only child of Lucien and Denise Santé. Following the bankruptcy of my father's employer…" (Santé: 3). This is a major theme of Santé's work, in which the reader is assured the opening statements are true, but are then advanced upon with conflicting stories as each paragraph continues. The identity Santé creates is one of order and repetition, before the supposed embellished stories later in the paragraph construct the identity of a man hoping to escape from said mundane repetition. His opening statement establishes the beginning of a