SOURCE: Pringle, Mary Beth. “Butor's Room without a View: The Train Compartment in La Modification.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 5, no. 3 (fall 1985): 112–18.

In the following essay, Pringle contends that the train compartment in Butor's La Modification signifies a “microcosm within a microcosm” and reflects the protagonist's view of and relationship to the larger world.

Twentieth-century novelists frequently use train compartments to represent microcosms of the worlds through which trains travel; French writers are no exception. In at least one novel by Butor, Gide, and Larbaud,¹ and in a film by Alain Robbe-Grillet, a train figures prominently. None has been written, however, in which the train is more important than in La Modification by Michel Butor. Its plot traces a rail journey made by Léon Delmont from Paris to Rome in a train compartment on the Paris-Rome Rapide. The commonplace furnishings of the compartment, its passengers, and their luggage...