Existentialism: Hope or Despair? 7
kaleidoscope or a series of rapid flashes, in which characters
and situations are somehow fused, so that one is often at a
loss to tell whether the characters determine the situations
or the situations the characters. And since the action skips
without any sort of warning from Paris to the Riviera to
North Africa to Spain and even to America the reader sooner
or later gets the impression of a sort of totality. It seems that
the author is saying that every man is endlessly involved in
specific situations, that his reality depends on his being so
involved, and that each situation is a facet of the history of
the world; indeed that in some way the action of each human
being determines the destiny of every other human being.
But even more important, as we shall see, is the role that
liberty plays a Sartre’s world, and I should not hesitate to
say that for want of a hero in this formless imbroglio of char-
acters who seem to be in perpetual crisis—the fact that one
of them, Mathieu, resembles Sartre like a brother does not
alter things very much—the central character is not a char-
acter at all, but a concept: human liberty. It is perhaps be-
cause Sartre strives to leave their liberty intact that his char-
acters move about so freely and that the novel seems to
be in so many places at once. The fact that there is so much
action and so Bttle plot almost leads one to believe that
Sartre would define plot as the technique by which an author
“enslaves” his creations.
Nevertlieless, many admirers of Sartre claim that it is in
the drama that his creative talents find their clearest expres-
sion and there is much to be said for this, particularly when
one considers how much of the novels is made up of dialogue.
But their plot may scarcely be said to be their strong point
except where, as in the case of The Flies, Sartre is inspired
by the Greeks, or where he is writing for the cinema, which