Understanding Alain Robbe-Grillet

Abstract

Emerging early in the 1950s as an articulate and provocative spokesman for the new novel, Alain Robbe-Grillet has remained one of the world's leading practitioners of experimental narrative. He continues to reinvent the genre in ways that challenge the conventions of traditional realism, much of the time bewildering readers and critics with his subversion of narrative structure and of such staples of traditional fiction as character, plot, and chronology. In this introduction to the French writer, Roch C. Smith suggests that despite the initial shock often felt on a first encounter with Robbe-Grillet, reading his work can be great fun for someone willing to tolerate defamiliarization and ambiguity and to become an interactive traveller through his narrative mazes. With this exploration of Robbe-Grillet's novels, short stories and autobiographies, Smith offers a guide for the adventuresome reader to the writer's labyrinthine and playful world.