All novels, of every age, are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: "What is the self?"
- If it through action that man steps forth from the repetitive universe of the everyday where each persona resembles every other person; it is through action that he distinguished himself from others and becomes an individual.
On Proust's lost time: There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible, and palpable, than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in this fact.
First paradox: The more powerful the lens of the microscope observing the self, the more the self and its uniqueness elude us.
Where does the self begin and end? Not wonder at the immeasurable infinity of the soul; rather, wonder at the uncertain nature of the self and of its identity. [...] There are several means of grasping the self. First, through action. Next, through the interior life. As for yourself (Kundera), you declare the self is determined by the essence of its existential problem.
Two centuries of psychological realism have created some nearly inviolable standards:
1. A writer must give the maximum amount of information about a character: about his physical appearence, his way of speaking and behaving...
1. He must let the reader know a character's past, because that is where all the motives for his present behavior are located.
1. The character must have complete independence; that is to say, the author with his own considerations must disappear so as not to disturb the reader, who wants to give himself over to illusion and take fiction for reality.
- A character is not a simulation of a living being. It is an imaginary being. An experimental self. In that way the novel reconnects with its beginnings. Don Quixote is practically unthinkable as a living being. And yet, in our memory, what character is more alive?
- The reader's imagination automatically completes the writer's.
- A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything's he's capable of.
The novelist is neither historian nor prophet: *he is an explorer of existence*.