Still the trademark Robbe-Grillet obsession with details, with visuals. But towards the end, near the end, the soldier who until then was mostly just the observed, the object of the I’s gaze (who told us s/he was alone, in the very first sentence of the novel), was now allowed a glimpse of his interiority–even if only to justify the compulsion to record the surroundings: “… the soldier is still perturbed by such a gap in his memory. He wonders if anything else in his surroundings might have escaped him and even continues to escape him now. It suddenly seems very important to make an exact inventory of the room.”
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The novel begins with I and ends with me, and yet s/he does not reveal anything about her/himself; s/he’s the least known in the end. The self is ultimately the location of the most intricate of labyrinths.
Filed under: 1001 Lists & Beyond Tagged: Alain Robbe-Grillet, Beyond the 1001 Books
