Portrait d'un Inconnu is a novel concerned with its own composition. It draws on many fields of imagery—notably biological and zoological—but it is particularly the imagery of childhood, sustained throughout the novel, which introduces the reader to the core of the novel's preoccupations…. [A] systematic use of childhood imagery serves two related purposes.

First, it is a stylistic device for conveying the fluid sub-surface of consciousness to the reader, without falling into the pitfalls of psychological abstraction, or over-precise definition…. Nathalie Sarraute reaches down to the universal experiences of childhood in order to surmount the difficulties faced by the narrator, and to overcome the resistance of readers who may resent the unfamiliar matter.

Secondly, childhood imagery illuminates for the reader the uncertain situation of the narrator in relation to the world of his experience. This uncertainty is not peculiar to the narrator, but reflects the problematic areas involved in the creation of any narrative…. The defences and refusals which the narrator (whom we shall call N) encounters are at the same time those which adults might offer a questioning child, and which readers might offer a questioning writer. Through the figure of N, in his dual rôle as child and writer, we are able to observe closely the effort to submit a particular, non-authoritative version of human life to the reader, and persuade him to acknowledge it as his own. (pp. 177-78)

How is the novelist, stripped of authority and the traditional props, to sustain the interest of the reader? The answer lies in part in the fact that the abandonment of such props as plot and characterization is not entire. It is the gradually emergent figure of N himself that gives the novel its unity, and his attempt to establish reality—a narrative—is its plot. Although the external world appears decomposed and fragmentary, the framework of N's preoccupations presents a relatively stable world of consciousness. And in this world, N's situation as a quasi-child, baffled and questioning, elicits the reader's sympathy and focuses attention on N's simultaneously literary and existential quest. (p. 178)

We are allowed to observe the physical limitations of the narrator's viewpoint, and reminded that he is neither ubiquitous nor omniscient. We see his dependence on his own experience and imagination for his interpretation of people and events. Further, we are encouraged, by the tentative and self-correcting mode of the narration, to be aware of the difficulties of precise expression. N, in short, presents the drama of the individual mind trying to make sense of himself and the world, while lacking any absolute point of reference to confirm or deny his constructions. (p. 179)

A childhood universe of good and evil (in which the figures are often reversible) is always implicit, and provides the basic imagery in which the movements of emotional life are to be apprehended. Such imagery allows the novelist to reach down beneath the surface of cultural and social sophistication to an almost elemental level of feeling, since it permits rapid movement between the nuances of complex reactions and the tiny primitive elements of which the complexities are composed. It is by the use of such a technique that Nathalie Sarraute is able to present the fluidities of experience both in slow motion and in close-up, without falling into static analysis.

A further result of this technique is the exhibiting of a gesture or word in the very act of taking its place in N's world. It is N's habit to isolate a word or gesture in such a way as to communicate by metaphor or analogy the nature of his reaction to it…. [The] immediate recognizability of the image sharply evokes the lived quality of the experience, and stresses the permanence of childhood experience in maturity. Beneath the sophistication of adult social life, we are made aware of the continuance of a child world of aggression and defence, hope and fear. (pp. 180-81)

The imagery of childhood and childish games is also a means of expressing the moments when the gap between the inner and outer worlds reasserts itself, creating an unbridgeable gulf between the individual and his experience. The gulf is expressed by the crumbling of reality, and the reduction of whole areas of experience to the realm of childish fantasy. When there is a gap between the child's reality and the 'adult' reality acknowledged by the world, one of the two is at fault, and we see, in the course of the novel, each version of 'reality' in turn identified with a fantasy world of games and toys, a world of make-believe…. The imagery of childhood … embodies a central question of the novel: is N giving an account of 'reality', or is his world merely the negligible product of his childish fantasies? N is constantly threatened by assimilation into the world of playthings and dolls, but when his confidence is firm, it is the world of the cliché and the commonplace that disintegrates into a dolls' house, furnished with make-believe.

The everyday world of the novel abuts at all points on the realm of fairy-land, and like images of childhood, references to fairytales recur from novel to novel in Nathalie Sarraute's work…. [The fairy-tale imagery] seems to express a permanent undercurrent of hope and fear, a constant total emotional involvement of the individual, moving so rapidly between defence and attack, withdrawal and expansion. And it has another function, which is to embody the longing to take possession of the world by incantation, or—in N's case—by the magical power of language. (pp. 183-84)

N's language betrays a constant impulse to escape into the conte de fées, where incantation and magic are all-powerful. The transposition into fairy-tale terms conveys the longing to create a world in which unpredictability is ultimately governable, and where the vicissitudes of life may be dominated by the magic of words—or talismans like the portrait of the unknown man. But when N finally uses the portrait as a talisman, in his encounter with the daughter, he finds it unavailing against the personal attack with which she responds. This failure anticipates N's ultimate failure to reduce the world to the dimensions of his chosen language.

The fairy-tale supplies N with a familiar and evocative imagery for the expression of his feelings about the world. If the eyes of the portrait are so intense and vital, it is because they are like the eyes of some creature in which the soul of a prince or princess is trapped by enchantment, and if N feels 'delivered' by the sight of it, he also sees himself as the 'deliverer'. In so far as he pierces the charm, and reestablishes his reality, he is both deliverer and delivered: he becomes the prince in command of magical forces…. It is similarly by the creative magic of his own language that N attempts his conquest of the world of his experience, though his language ultimately proves ineffectual against the obstinate strength of practical life…. At the end, having questioned the rules of the game, and having scrutinized the players, N is faced by defeat. He is forced to join the ring—a recurring image of child-subjection…. (p. 185)

Throughout Portrait d'un Inconnu, the efforts of the child-figure to exist in a world ruled by powerful and threatening adults coincide with the efforts of the novelist to create his own world. As the child strives after his freedom and his own values, so the novelist strives for his creative freedom, tries to find his own voice, and to impose that voice in a hostile world. (p. 186)