SOURCE: Ramsay, Raylene. “The Unself-loving Woman in Nathalie Sarraute's Tu ne t'aimes pas.” The French Review: Journal of the American Association of Teachers of French 67, no. 5 (April 1994): 793-802.

In the following essay, Ramsay proposes that Sarraute's autobiographical sequel to Enfance, titled Tu ne t'aimes pas, continues the discussion she initiated in the first work about the nature of self and its relationship to others, including language and textual strategy.

Nathalie Sarraute's successful “new autobiography” Enfance (1983) could be described as a dialogic reconstitution of the self which took fragmented uncertain form in interaction with the significant others of childhood (mothers, father, teachers). At the same time, it is a reconstruction of these others within the present moment as they too are re-formed by memory and given recognition by the two different voices of the text. Such questions of the self and the other and their relations with the textual...