Between truth and fiction: Identity in 'Le miroir qui revient' and 'Enfance'

When Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute turned their attention to autobiography, they questioned its traditional model. In Le miroir qui revient and Enfance, Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute write autobiographies---if autobiographies are, in fact, what they are write---that place significance on the present and rely on the use of fiction. The self as presented in text, then, is as incomplete as the autobiography that ventures to express it, an entity that gestures to the process of its own creation. As such, these new autobiographies demand a reader one who navigates fictive spaces and moments of self-conscious incompletion, as well as the ambiguity such spaces bring.