Reality, for Sarraute, means a reality that is rid of the “preconceived ideas and ready-made images that encase it.” It is opposed to “the surface reality that everyone can easily see and which, for want of anything better, everyone uses.” According to Sarraute, for a writer to be in contact with reality he must “attain something that is thus far unknown, which, it seems to him, he is the first to have seen.”
