Robbe Grillet The Voyeur

Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Published by Grove Press. Contact seller. Seller Rating:. Used Condition: Fair. Within U.

Although Robbe-Grillet is often seen as a difficult writer, many of the early novels are, at least on the surface, easily summarised. Le Voyeur centres around …. Citation: Adams, Craig. The Literary Encyclopedia. If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to your 'Account' here. The Literary Encyclopedia is a living community of scholars. We welcome comments which will help us improve.

The plot is simple, bare: Mathias, an itinerant watch salesman, takes an early morning ferry to the island of his birth, purportedly to make sales. Arriving shortly after ten on an unseasonably warm April morning, Mathias has roughly six hours to canvass the island before the ferry departs for the mainland at four. Naturally it comes as a surprise to the reader that, despite his urgent calculations on the boat, Mathias loses track of time at a cafe in town while he waits for a garageman to fetch him a bicycle. Yet the degree to which Mathias begins to squander his day on the island is ambiguous at first because Robbe-Grillet is a writer who distorts time. Two pages of description can span a single minute, maybe less.

Psychological or ideological analysis should be excluded — the reader must guess what hides under details and events. Despite its focus on objective reality cleansed of human feeling, Robbe-Grillet insisted, the nouveau roman is entirely subjective; its world is always perceived through the eyes of a character, not an omniscient narrator. In his essays For a New Novel Robbe-Grilled condemned the use of metaphors, because they anthropomorphize objects. The title of the work refers to Mathias, a traveling watch salesman, who watches his wife obsessively. He is perhaps is a rapist and a murderer, or his crimes are merely the products of his imagination.