| dc.description.abstract | 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.
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