Taking as a starting point the shift from traditional narrative to the novel at the beginning of modernity, as understood by Walter Benjamin, particularly in his essay The Storyteller, this text will investigate the literary expressions of the process of decline in collective experience that came about with the emergence of the bourgeoisie and industrial societies at the end of the 19th century. To do so, this work will examine Benjamin’s concept of experience (Erfahrung) and it’s decline in modernity, as well as its replacement by isolated experience (Erlebnis), since the meaning of life was no longer given immediately in collectivity. In the realm of artistic forms, the novel has been seen, therefore, as a way of finding the lost meaning from an individual perspective. The analyses that Benjamin makes of the lyric poetry of Baudelaire and the Proust novel In Search of Lost Time are part of this trajectory, as well as the notions of allegory, memory, remembrance and death. The fragments of Berlin Childhood around 1900, together with Proustian Recherche, offer an opportunity to reflect on the problem of time and discuss the possibility of the construction of experience in writing.