The final chapter of this study focuses on Ernaux's two most recent non-diary works, La Honte and L'Evénement. If La Honte and L'Evénement's chronological position makes them appropriate texts with which to conclude a study of Ernaux's writing, they equally represent a culmination of the many ‘Ernausian’ themes and techniques discussed in previous chapters, yet a culmination which is oddly circular. By way of conclusion, then, the following analyses of La Honte and L'Evénement will incorporate references to earlier works. As this study has highlighted, the narrative structure of Ernaux's texts is typically circular, in that a female narrator provides retrospective analysis of past events before returning to the present at the works’ conclusion: ‘Tous mes livres sont des univers clos, hélas! Il n'y a pas d'issue.’ This circularity is apparent in the thematic content of even the most linear works – the ‘diaries’: the beginning of Journal du dehors, for example, can be read as containing an implicit reference to the mother and her deterioration from Alzheimer's disease in its description of a graffito reading ‘DÉMENCE’, while the work ends with an explicit reference to her; similarly, ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’ begins and ends with the death of the mother, a thematics which informs Ernaux's entire writing project. If circularity characterises the intratextual structure of Ernaux's writing, La Honte and L'Evénement bring the corpus itself round full circle: while La Honte represents the ultimate return to origins in its positing of the ‘primal scene’ as the ur-source of all subsequent shame and alienation experienced by Ernaux's narrators, L'Evénement brings her writing trajectory back to its original point of departure in that it supplements her first text, Les Armoires vides, in its account of the narrator's abortion. Viewed consecutively, La Honte and L'Evénement reflect the progressive stages in the maturation process of the narrator in Ernaux's corpus and the class divide which distinguishes childhood from adulthood: while La Honte projects the narrator back to the world of childhood and depicts the principal event in initiating estrangement between parents and daughter, L'Evénement can be seen to portray its ultimate realisation in the act of abortion, the life-changing event which symbolises the narrator's severance with her working-class childhood and the definitive advent of both adult consciousness and bourgeois status.