Existentialism: a Philosophy of Hope or Despair?



6 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
brilliant aptitude for journalism as a writer for various clan-
destine publications. He continued this career after the libera-
tion as a correspondent for the famed newspaper
Combat.
His assignments during this period included a trip to America
and I presume that it was in America, too, that he came to
appreciate writers like Faulkner and Steinbeck. In any case
it would be difficult to appraise his talent as a novelist with-
out taking into account their influence.

As a novelist Sartre was already known in his own country
as the author of a short work bearing the quaintly existential-
ist title
Nausea, which is the formidably depressing story of
a man engaged in the lucid contemplation of himself. He ends
by discovering that the world is absurd and human life even
more so, and slowly flounders in what can only be described
as a miasma of subjectivity. It is noteworthy that the scene
of the novel is Le Havre, where Sartre had taught school for
a while. But both the scene and the action are so slight that
it is difficult to call
Nausea a novel at all. A number of short
stories, collected under the title
The Wall, are Iiveher but
they too are concerned with the subjective side of life, and it
was not until the tetralogy
The Roads to Liberty, tire first
volume of which was published in 1945,β that Sartre found
that his talent as a creative writer lay in the projection of
human character not from within but from without, some-
what as a realist or a naturalist would, so that this vast and
lusty canvas of life in Europe before the outbreak of war and
during the first weeks of hostilities is nothing if not an intri-
cate weaving together of many situations and actions as
diverse as the characters who accomplish them. The result
is that the reader has the impression not so much that he is
following a story as that he is perusing a rapidly turning

* The fourth volume has not yet appeared.



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