[Michaux's Qui je fus] consisted of prose stories, aphorisms and poems; and contained most of the stylistic features that characterize subsequent writings:—verbal humour and ingenuity; all almost Rabelaisian gusto in using words and inventing new ones; a tone at once half-playful and profoundly serious; frequent and abrupt changes from violent direct attack, and prophetic imprecations in the biblical manner, to the deceptive tranquillity of statements pitched in a completely different key; and, in addition, an inexhaustible range of fantasy and imagination….

Most of Michaux's preoccupations, which he later develops as subjects or themes, or as an endless pattern of relationships, are also evident [in Qui je fus]: the one and the many; the slowness of speech and the rapidity of thought; immobility and metamorphosis; unusual customs and beliefs; the façade or mask, and what it conceals and reveals; the origins of things and of human beings...