In his various novels, Butor explores the nature of reality and the part imagination plays in our perception—or creation—of it.

In L'Emploi du Temps [Passing Time], many different elements of experience come together in Revel's narrative of his experience in Bleston. His affective experience, for instance, is intimately associated with his cultural experience—his response, among other things, to a detective novel, to various films, to the Theseus tapestry seen in Bleston Town Hall, and to Bleston's two cathedrals. Jacques Revel in Bleston is an individual consciousness set at a point of confluence which he uniquely registers and interprets. (p. 42)

Butor's novel is narrated in the first-person, which … allows the observation of conscious processes in the narrating mind. We are not, as it were, plugged in to an unselfconscious being …, who unwittingly distorts all he sees, but are introduced instead into the preoccupations of a highly...