At a certain moment in Nathalie Sarraute's novel Les Fruits d'or, a fairly typical moment from this writer's work, we see a male character trying to deal with an unexpected challenge. The passage goes like this:

The extravagantly metaphorical rendering of the disarray provoked by a sudden question is one example of Sarraute's exploration of the hidden continents of self. She is working here in the modern line of Dostoevsky, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, for one of the dominant features of modern fiction (alongside the interrogation of the very conditions of representation) is the ever more penetrating representation of the inner self. But at the same time, the reader is made aware, here as elsewhere in Sarraute, of the way in which, however feebly, this devastated self attempts to face the world, to ‘se raccrocher’, to present itself to others, to find a successful strategy for survival and success.