Nathalie Sarraute is tireless in her appeal to a common experience: the inner world which she represents in her writing is, she insists, a world that we share, a world in which differences as they may appear on the surface simply do not count. No other writer asserts this commonality more strongly than Sarraute. And yet at the same time, she presents this shared experience within a frame that is equally assertive about its novelty, in other words, about its difference. The claim for sameness is made in terms and forms that simultaneously advertise their difference from what has gone before. This creates a curious paradox which is one of the factors that give Sarraute's writing its characteristic and uneasy vigour, and the energies produced by this tension seem inseparable from the anxiety that is palpable everywhere in her work. One senses in Sarraute a constant worry about the ways in which sameness and difference will be construed by those to whom her appeal to shared experience is addressed. There is a fear that sameness will be traduced as an assimilation into something alien, and an equal dread that difference will take the form of rejection and exclusion. Questions of sameness and difference are inextricably associated with anxiety in Sarraute. And yet, paradox and dread notwithstanding, there appear to be no other terms available to her for thinking experience.

This places her fair and square within the literary tradition of the twentieth century.