The article investigates passé composé in the context of its aspectual semantics. On the example of ‘Les Catilinaires’, a novel by a modern French writer A. Nothomb, this study considers the influence of such aspectual meanings as accomplished / unaccomplished and divisibility / non-divisibility on the use of different verb tenses that can express a single action in the past in the narrative text of literary fiction. A complex characteristics is given to the opposition between ‘passé composé’ and ‘passé simple’, two tenses that are used in narrative text. It reveals the correlation between, on the one hand, aspectual properties of ‘passé composé’ and ‘passé simple’ and, on the other hand, the speech time, the narrator and different kinds of utterance. Special attention is given to the possibility of using these two past tenses in order to mark out different compositional parts of a fictional text.