My thesis is a contemporary realistic novel using alternating perspectives. Footwork explores the modern day-to-day struggles and temptations that face monogamous relationships. How do we negotiate truth within society and expectations that others have of us? What are the deals we make with ourselves and each other in order to live within society? Footwork examines how truth and pain interact. Does truth always have to come forward at the cost of pain? There are three books that represent the contemporary cannon where Footwork could be situated. Infidelity by Stacey May Fowles encompasses alternate perspectives and deals with an affair as the central theme. Love and the Mess We’re In by Stephen Marche focuses on two perspectives of an affair and much of the book uses dialogue with the characters’ inner thoughts also written. Roddy Doyle’s The Snapper concentrates on a dysfunctional family, infidelity and is primarily dialogue. All three novels explore realistic portrayals of truth and infidelity. Footwork goes further by examining the intricacies of how people deal with deception and also forces the reader to have an emotional reaction. One of the ways this emotional reaction is achieved is by Footwork primarily being written in dialogue form. The dialogue encourages the reader to become emotionally invested in the characters’ struggles. The novel does not employ flashbacks, but instead focuses on the immediacy of the characters’ lives to create a story authentic to contemporary relationships. Footwork also uses alternating perspectives as a device to make the reader question which character he/she should be fighting for or against. All the characters have motives for why and how they deceive. The reader understands one character’s perspective only to be challenged by another character’s perspective. All three main characters at the end of Footwork find and/or speak their truth despite the pain that is inflicted.

La catégorie du roman du qui ? comprend des romans écrits par des romanciers qui ne sont pas strictement contemporains les uns des autres, tels Henry Miller, Paul Auster et Michel Houellebecq. Ces romanciers suggèrent une problématicité de la parole, marquée par des indices référentiels contradictoires et ambigus. Ils compensent l’incertitude de ces indices par la stabilité qu’ils prêtent aux personnages et parce qu’ils se veulent réalistes : ils inscrivent leurs romans nettement dans leur époque et font de leurs personnages les témoins de cette époque. Cette dualité — incertitude du statut de la parole et réalisme — explique qu’au cadre spatial et temporel réaliste soient liés des jeux instables d’énonciation et d’identité. Cela justifie la catégorie de « roman du qui ? » et permet de lire, chez Henry Miller, Paul Auster et Michel Houellebecq, une problématicité, celle de la parole, celle des temps qu’évoquent ces romans. / The category of the novel of the whom? includes novels written by novelists who are not strictly contemporaries of each other, such as Henry Miller, Paul Auster and Michel Houellebecq. These novelists suggest a problematics of speech, marked by contradictory and ambiguous referential indices. They compensate the uncertainty of these indices by the stability they lend to the characters and because they want to be realistic: they write their novels clearly in their time and make their characters witnesses of this time. This duality - uncertainty of the status of the speech and realism - explains that the realistic spatial and temporal framework are linked by unstable games of enunciation and identity. This justifies the category of the “novel of the whom?” and allows Henry Miller, Paul Auster and Michel Houellebecq to read a problematic, that of speech, of the times evoked by these novels.

Bien que fort différents, les romans des années 1950 d’Alain Robbe-Grillet et les romans des années 1960 de Robert Pinget ont prétendu contester les formes littéraires que le XXe siècle a héritées du siècle précédent, et notamment la description dite « balzacienne ». Nous interrogeons ici les modalités linguistiques de cette contestation et l’ambiguïté littéraire de ce déni d’héritage. La relation entre la description telle que l’ont pratiquée d’une part ces deux « Nouveaux Romanciers » et d’autre part les grands auteurs réalistes du XIXe siècle est ici envisagée selon une triple perspective : le maintien ou non d’une textualité prototypiquement méronymique ; la construction langagière d’une réalité dont l’existence est soudain moins sûre ; l’effacement énonciatif et ses conséquences esthétiques. Selon une approche résolument technique, les descriptions romanesques de Pinget et de Robbe-Grillet sont donc ici systématiquement mises en regard de descriptions canoniques de Balzac, mais aussi de Flaubert et de Zola. La contestation du protocole réaliste repose en effet sur une reprise et un refus : la complexité textuelle, la confusion dénotative et reférentielle, l’instabilité énonciative permettent aux deux romanciers de procurer des descriptions à la fois hyperréalistes et antiréalistes. Tout en prenant acte de la différence radicale des deux auteurs, il s’agit finalement de montrer comment l’un et l’autre sont parvenus à mettre au point un protocole descriptif résolument nouveau, qui rende compte du monde en tant qu’il est et en tant qu’il échappe. / Although very different, the novels of the 1950s by Alain Robbe-Grillet and of the 1960s by Robert Pinget claimed to challenge the literary forms that the twentieth century has inherited from the previous century, including the description of Honoré de Balzac. We question here the linguistic modalities of this confrontation, as well as the literary ambiguity of this denial of inheritance.The relationship between the description as have practiced these two "New Novelists" and on the other hand the great realistic writers of the nineteenth century is considered here in a triple perspective: maintenance / defence - or not – of a textuality, which is prototypically based on meronymy ; the linguistic construction of a reality whose existence is suddenly uncertain ; the enunciative erasure and its aesthetic consequences. In a decidedly technical approach, the descriptions of the novels of and Robbe-Grillet and Pinget are systematically opposed to the canonical descriptions of Balzac, but also to some extent to Flaubert and Zola. Challenging the realistic protocol is indeed based both on a recovery and a refusal: the textual complexity, the denotative and referential confusion and the enunciative instability allow these two novelists to provide descriptions which can be considered hyperrealistic as well as antirealistic. Eventually, while acknowledging the radical difference between the two authors, the aim is to show how both writers have managed to develop a considerably new descriptive protocol that reflects the world as it is and as it escapes.