A few of the most important and meaningful novels by authors who were writing between the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, form Flaubert to Beckett, from Dostoevskij to Kafka, are compared with the work of philosophers and theorists of literature and of the novel, such as Lukacs, Bachtin, Ricoeur, Benjamin and others. In this way the fundamental themes and techniques of the novel are identified: the problem of meaning, of time, of memory, and, not least, the problem of the relationship between author and character.