The determination of French national identity in the second half of the twentieth century has been greatly complicated by the uncertain status of North African immigrants and especially their children who occupy a liminal space in the discourse of personal identity formation—granted access to neither the cultural referent of their parents nor that of their “host” country. The question for this group becomes if and how integration is possible in any way that will allow them to posit their identity within a recognizable collectivity. Y. B.’s novel proposes a problematic model of integration which eliminates the possibility of integration itself, replacing it, instead, with an integration constructed upon differentiation. My presentation will read the catastrophic consequences of this approach, dependant on the existence of singularity, against the totalizing discourse of globalism in an attempt to shed light on the seemingly ineluctable conflict and necessarily uncertain ground on which the novel concludes. This analysis will rely heavily on interpretation of the narrator’s use of cultural referents as a rhetorical device to establish himself as an “entrepreneur of memoire” and the systemic response this approach elicits, as witnessed in the structure of the novel’s final sections. In conclusion, I will propose a reading of the text which dispossesses the narrative from both the narrator/protagonist and the hegemonic discourse of dominant French culture in an attempt to demonstrate how Y.B. offers the reader the raw material for identity creation outside the delineated spaces imposed by the concept of integration.