It is the structure and style that offer the reader a way into the often bewildering and disturbing fictional worlds of Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Alain Robbe-Grillet. The problem confronting writers since the middle of the nineteenth century was how to cope artistically with an increasingly alienating and mechanized world. Kafka, Beckett and Robbe-Grillet conclude, by the example of their fictions, that the writer’s province is no longer this impossible environment. Instead, the writer must work within the knowledge available to any one person–the knowledge attained through one’s perceptions. So the shape of the story is determined by a narrating consciousness, that single character through whose awareness the details are filtered. Thus, in a special sense, the tale and the telling are one.