Sarraute's psychological "tropisms" are the almost unconscious expressions of inner sensations underlying everyday speech and gestures that she had noted in others as well as herself.

These movements form the minute yet complex dramas underneath one's words and overt acts, providing clues to one's real feelings. Perhaps the first to perceive and to write down these inner impulses, Sarraute was challenged by the task of capturing unexpressed feeling before it becomes conscious in the subject. Continually shifting and therefore elusive, tropisms could not be expressed through exposition, dialogue, or interior monologue.

The author had to seize them in flight, analyze them, and find the language to make the reader experience them as his own simultaneously with the subject.

Sarraute's search for new means of expression in order to communicate tropisms has been constant.

Although individuals, and usually uncertain of their own emotions, Sarraute's characters share some common experiences...