娜塔莉薩洛特 (Nathalie Sarraute) 為法國二十世紀新小說具代表性的作家之一。本論文試論述作者如何從生物學裡的向性概念Tropis m（即植物受自然界外力的壓迫，以致改變其生長方向的過程）延伸至文本書寫，解釋人物底層複雜且難以定義的心理活動，即感受(sensations)。向性不僅是薩洛特第一本著作的名稱，同時宣告了其後作品的書寫策略。此外，亦嘗試比較第一本著作《向性》與晚年自傳《童年》對於感受描繪的差異。 第一章探討《向性》一書裡，作者透過文章結構、詞彙佈置出一個充滿刺激物的文字空間啟動人類的五種感官，進而觀察人物微妙的心理活動轉化。本書以未完成過去式（l’imparfait）行文，傳達出感知經驗、知覺記憶與生存的不可分割。 第二章談論作者藉由時間副詞的運用、人物動作的拆解以達到展示和捕捉轉瞬即逝的感受。此外，分析描繪感受的各種修辭，並比較兩個文本間修辭的差異。 第三章，專論自傳《童年》。憑著聽覺記憶，回溯大人言語所帶來的創傷經驗，並透過潛對話裡敘事者雙重自我的問答及欲言又止的陳述，階層式的進入創傷經驗的核心，挑戰感受描述的極限。從《向性》到《童年》，從捕捉到探索感受的強度及真相，顯現出薩洛特對感受描繪的演進。 Known as a French New Novelist of the twentieth century, Nathalie Sarraute made a deliberate attempt to explore the inner world of her characters by ignoring their surface appearance or social indications that traditional novelists value. She takes the biological concept ‘tropism’ as a starting point to explain sensations, resulting in the complicated psychological movements of human beings. The description of sensation constitutes the essential subject matter of Sarraute’s works. This thesis concentrates on discussing the different ways of approaching and examining sensations in her first work Tropismes and her autobiography Enfance, published in her later years. The first chapter analyses the structure of Tropismes, including the structural form, past tense verbs, and expressions of the fives senses. The author intended to create text full of sensorial stimulus, to demonstrate the indefinable movements of characters, like the reactions of plants evoked from the forces of Nature. Chapter two introduces the methods of drawing the momentary sensations with words in Tropismes. The prime concern of writing this novel is to prolong and to emphasize the essential factors in the forming process of tropisms. The various strategies by which Sarraute intended to interpret the sensations are mentioned, especially the rhetoric and the different expressions of sensations in these two works. Chapter three focuses on Sarraute’s autobiography Enfance. The impressive fragments of childhood in each chapter of Enfance offer a journey of discovering, measuring the past sensations mainly caused by violent words and phrases of adults. Sarraute invented ‘sub-conversations’, composed of conversations from two different points of view of the narrator, in order to reveal the deep conscience about Sarraute’s traumatic experiences during childhood. From Tropismes to Enfance, Sarraute devoted her efforts to investigate subterranean actions, so-called tropisms. However, instead of simply portraying them, she gradually tried to approach and face the psychological truth of past sensations by means of sub-conversations.
