This dissertation analyzes the novels The magic mountain by Thomas Mann, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, and Time regained by Marcel Proust, linked to the historical moments of the First World War (1914-1918), which integrates its narratives, and of the post-Great War, when these volumes were published – respectively in 1924, 1925 and 1927. It contains the hypothesis that these texts participate in an inflection of the idea of Historical progress as it had been outlined, above all, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and they overtake this inflexion by the narrative capacity, understood as a synonym of life. Given the breadth made possible by fictional literature, the investigation proposes a consideration of the notions of Life and History present in the works not only to study a historic period of changes in their conceptions but also to provoke the narratives of the present.