Mon coeur à l’étroit (2007), by Marie NDiaye, features a martyrology of mediocrity focused on a middle-class character whose actions, thoughts and relationships are ruled by the principle: “Il faut bien endurer.” The narrator and her husband, like many of the fictional beings created by the writer, are compelled by external circumstances rather than an internal motivation to embark on a labyrinthine and often fantastic search for a truth that is neither fully revealed nor ever entirely ignored. Nadia and Ange are schoolteachers in their fifties, living in Bordeaux, whose quiet life and peaceful conscience are surreptitiously undermined by an unknown malaise, a sickening and incomprehensible feeling of guilt and an unnamable yet indisputable doubt. The woman's self-portrait offers a mixture of delusion and lucidity, affirming stereotypes and revealing bitter insights: “Je suis maintenant une bourgeoise respectable, toujours très soigneusement habillée, coiffée, maquillée, et je parle sur un débit rapide, un ton légèrement haut, en ne ménageant que très peu d'espace entre mes phrases” (NDiaye 2007, 178) or “je suis là, protégée par mon argent […] – je suis là, bien maquillée et coiffée dignement, et certes bien trop grosse et quelque peu suante” (NDiaye 2007, 213). As with many other characters that populate NDiaye's fiction, self-awareness and self-delusion feed into and off one another, communicating through the conduit of a sensorial language akin to Nathalie Sarraute's “tropisms.” Such is the case in the metamorphosis undergone by Nadia and her antiphrastically named husband Ange.

Before manifesting itself in the characters’ physical appearance, the change is initially perceptual and social. Others begin to question their humanity, displaying disgust at the sight of the couple and recognizing in them the radical negation of what Derrida calls “le rapport à soi d'une humanité d'abord jalouse et soucieuse de son propre” (Derrida 2006, 32). Under their gaze, the couple is reduced to the condition of animals. Since the first-person narrative precludes any certainty about what others truly think, Nadia's testimony fills the cognitive gap. Even as her interpretation alternates between hypothesis and assertion, it seizes upon the animality projected onto herself and her husband: “Des regards hargneux se posent sur nous, sans dissimulation, comme si nous étions des chiens fouineurs et si laids qu'on ne peut les regarder qu'avec rancune” (NDiaye 2007, 13).