SOURCE: Willging, Jennifer. “Partners in Slime: The Liquid and the Viscous in Sarraute and Sartre.” Romanic Review 92, no. 3 (May 2001): 277-96.

In the following essay, Willging compares the work of Sarraute to that of Sartre and notes the similarities between them.

Nathalie Sarraute would not have appreciated this essay, because in it I propose to compare, as other critics have done in the past, her work with that of Jean-Paul Sartre. Sarraute's testiness about the nature of her intellectual relationship with Sartre simply “oozes” (in keeping with the theme of this essay) from the pages of a 1989 interview with Françoise Dupuy-Sullivan (“Dialogue avec Nathalie Sarraute”) in which Sarraute describes her first contact with Sartre. At her publisher's suggestion, she says, she sent him a copy of her first text, Tropismes (1939). He responded to her with “un mot, très gentil,” telling her that the text interested him very...