In the following essay, Stoltzfus examines the artistic, literary, and theoretical influences behind the creative process in Robbe-Grillet's fiction. “According to Robbe-Grillet,” writes Stoltzfus, “every fiction is the story of a gamesman in a quicksand world who is continuously reinventing himself.”

In the following essay, Milman provides analysis of Robbe-Grillet's metaphysical concerns and narrative presentation in the short story “La Plage.” Milman notes strong similarities between Robbe-Grillet's “absurd view of man” and the philosophical tenets of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre.

In the following essay, Ramsay examines Robbe-Grillet's pastiche of autobiography, myth, memory, literary text, and history in Les Derniers Jours de Corinthe. According to Ramsay, “The text sets out to consciously stage, deconstruct, indeed to ‘ruin,’ both its own generative mechanisms and the monsters and the sirens lurking in the writer's subconscious.”

In the following essay, Morrissette examines the development of narrative perspective in Robbe-Grillet's fiction and films. According to Morrissette, Robbe-Grillet's “ingenious and constantly varying narrative modes cover almost the entire spectrum of current experimentation and practice.”

In the following essay, Szanto examines the presentation of character and narrative perspective in Robbe-Grillet's fiction. According to Szanto, “Robbe-Grillet is not telling stories as much as he is creating characters—not really creating characters, either, as much as creating an atmosphere for a character.”

In the following essay, Szanto discusses Robbe-Grillet's philosophical perspective and concept of the “new novel” as delineated in Towards a New Novel. Szanto notes that Robbe-Grillet's theoretical writings have “contributed to the rampant misunderstanding about his fiction.”

In the fictional context of the nouveau roman, the problem of critical analysis is … compounded by the mediation of the object in language and its concomitant over-determination in the superimposed itineraries of narrative events, along with the necessity of demystifying the relation between subject and object, the signifier and the signified…. Robbe-Grillet's first two novels, Les Gommes (1953) and Le Voyeur (1955), presented to the reading public a surface ambiguous enough to provide ...

In the following essay, Wylie discusses the combination of humanist concerns and scientific observation in Robbe-Grillet's fiction. Noting the influence of Surrealism and existential philosophy on his work, Wylie writes, “For Robbe-Grillet the cosmos is neither absurd nor tragic; it simply is.”

In the following essay, Chadwick and Harger-Grinling examine elements of fantasy in Robbe-Grillet's fiction. According to the critics, “Robbe-Grillet takes his reader into a fantastic world whose closeness to everyday existence prompts the kind of anxiety that he feels characterizes life in the late twentieth century.”

Robbe-Grillet, for all his disavowals, writes novels and films that are simultaneously useful and useless. Like the Tel Quel group, he rejects Sartre's insistence that the artist be committed to a cause beyond art. Art for the "nouveaux romanciers" is, in and of itself, a sufficient cause, and the artist, they feel, need not search for political or social involvement beyond his work. But unlike that of the "nouveaux nouveaux romanciers" Robbe-Grillet's art, even tho...

From the outset, the proliferation of game structures in the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet identifies this writer as a notable example of artifex ludens. Almost all the tendencies that were later to be termed "aspects ludiques" in his novels and films may be uncovered by careful scrutiny of his earliest productions. It is even possible to reduce the numerous game structures to a few basic models, such as the circular or winding path of individual cases or rectangles (like those usually found on...

In the following review, West offers favorable evaluation of Ghosts in the Mirror.

In his first novel, Les Gommes, Robbe-Grillet deliberately exploits the potency of the Oedipus myth, while simultaneously undermining its pretensions to significance. Once the myth is planted in the text, a sculpture of a Greek chariot becomes fraught with meaning: station announcements become oracular, and snippets of news in the newspaper take on Delphic profundity. It is not only the central figure, Wallas, who is trapped, but readers too are caught in the snare of words. Readers determined to make sense...

In his first novel in almost seven years [Topology of a Phantom City], Alain Robbe-Grillet, spokesman and practitioner of the new novel (nouveau roman), conjures up the destroyed city of Vanadium. Using old and new tools "the city once more rears up …"—a city of both old and startlingly new forms. An archeologist (David G.? the narrator? the reader?) digs through abandoned rooms and endless corridors, "unrecognizable fragments of what were palatial homes, public buildings ...

In the following review, Sheringham offers tempered criticism of Les Derniers Jours de Corinthe. “If not for the pinch of irony which still enlivens Robbe-Grillet's writing, and his authentic merit as a stylist (often self-consciously paraded),” writes Sheringham, “few readers … would be likely to stay the course.”

In the following review, Wood offers tempered assessment of Ghosts in the Mirror. “Fortunately,” writes Wood, “the writing itself is better than the pompous theory.”

Mathias, in Robbe-Grillet's Le Voyeur, sees and/or creates figure-eights wherever he goes. Seagulls form the pattern overhead, bits of string fall into it underfoot, iron rings on docks form it before his eyes, even his bicycle trip around the island falls naturally into two joined loops, a figure-eight. The murder which he may or may not have committed takes place on a blank page between Section 1 and Section 2; in the spatial context of the island and his trip around it, it takes place at the point...

It is possibly (a key word here) significant that Robbe-Grillet's phantom city [in Topology of a Phantom City] should have a topology and not a topography and that the reader should be required to accept the arbitrariness of the writer's perceptions and imaginings, while being expected to attend scrupulously to the single bar of a prison window which would be rectangular rather than spherical in cross-section. No doubt (another key phrase), we are wrong to rely on the author/voyeur, who may se...

Robbe-Grillet is a filmmaker and [Topology of a Phantom City] addresses itself to the eye almost exclusively. There is not a line of dialogue in the book. But there is endless scene setting—the same scene presented over and over again. In the opening pages we are asked to gaze upon the nude body of a young girl who lies in a spreading pool of blood. With a technique that is hard to differentiate from standard stream-of-consciousness, Robbe-Grillet brings us back to this scene again and again…....