ABSTRACT
Nathalie Sarraute was born in 1900, so it should not really surprise us that the two nineteenth-century and four modernist novelists whom she invokes repeatedly in her criticism were actually her near contemporaries. If Sarraute's literary career took a relatively long time to get off the ground, the philosophical basis of her work changed hardly at all in six decades. Although she was a precocious reader, she began writing seriously only at the age of thirty-two, and by the time her first prose pieces were completed, her ideas were solidly established. Chronological juxtapositions are, moreover, essential for understanding Sarraute's position in twentieth-century literature, since no contemporary author has insisted as trenchantly on the straight and narrow lineage from which her own work derives. Concentrating on both the present and the recollected past, Sarraute seeks to extract these lost, dissolved, imprisoned, or smothered elements from the magma of everyday banality and examine them.
