Sartre: Le Mur

In this study of the short story collection, “Le Mur”, Sartre is situated in the context of the 1930s and each story is analyzed in turn for its ideas and authorial standpoint. The focus is on the governing motifs of walls and rooms, the obsessive themes of bad faith and the interpersonal power struggles centring on the mutual hostility of gaze. Sartre’s investigations embrace psychological aberrations, love and friendship and their impossibilities, sex, death, politics (left-wing and reactionary) and the mirages of humanism. Sartre’s debts to and divergent recycling of philosphical or psychoanalytical theories (Freud), of cultural phenomena (surrealism) and his own early version of existentialism are evaluated in the relevant stories. Particular attention is drawn to the blackly comic element in all the stories, the recurrence of play-acting to the detriment of positive activity, and the duality of Sartre’s stance (empathy/mockery).