The title of the book closes with a meaningful nod to Proust: "A man who sleeps holds around him the thread that ties the hours, the order followed by the years and the worlds." And it functions deceptively, corrosively, as the reader later discovers: while in Proust sleep folds successive memories and extends into the duration of the past, in Perec the whiteness of the canceled page dominates, where no memory is recorded, no trace of the past, no desire; the sleeping man lives (almost without "experiencing" it) in an obsessive, tuneless, paralyzing present, without a history behind him, without surprises, in a state of indifference, inertia, neutrality.

The third book by Georges Perec, after "Things: A Story of the Sixties" (1965) and "Which Little Nickel-Plated Steering Wheel in the Courtyard?" (1966), concludes his pre-Oulipian phase: the year of its publication coincides with the author's entry into the Workshop of Potential Literature (OuLiPo), in which he will subsequently serve with consistency and enthusiasm. It belongs, therefore, to the period when Perec is searching, gradually forming his literary identity, advancing tentatively on the paths of writing, knowing, however, that he is his vital space and that the only way to reconcile with himself and the world is to try to arrange it.

The autobiographical dimension is evident and acknowledged in this text by Perec, as in almost all his writings. In this labyrinthine narrative, he transcribes the depressive crisis he experienced ten years earlier (1956) and for which he needed the mediation of psychoanalysis. From this perspective, "The Sleeping Man" can also be seen as an initiatory narrative, the result of an apprenticeship that continues the journey towards self-knowledge, the finding or rediscovery of oneself.