13 - Sartre and His Literary Alter Ego Mathieu in Les Chemins de la liberté (1938–49): From the Roads to an Abstract Freedom to the Roads of Authenticity

Summary

La guerre a vraiment divisé ma vie en deux … C'est là, si vous voulez, que je suis passé de l'individualisme et de l'individu pur d'avant-guerre au social, au socialisme. C'est ça le vrai tournant de ma vie: avant, après. Avant, ça m'a mené à des oeuvres comme La Nausée [1938] … et après ça m'a mené lentement à la Critique de la raison dialectique [1960]

[War really divided my life into two parts…. It is then, if you want, that I went from individualism and the pure individual that I was before the war to the social, socialism. That was the turning point of my life: before, after. Before, it led me to works like La Nausée … after, slowly, to the Critique de la raison dialectique.]

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Mathieu … qui [est] moi.

[Mathieu … who [is] me.]

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Philosopher, novelist, playwright but also political theorist and literary critic, Sartre (1905–80) is the major intellectual figure of postwar France and one of the most influential twentieth-century thinkers. Critics have long established that an autobiographical dimension can be found in most, if not all his work. However, apart from his autobiographical essay Les Mots (Words), it is undoubtedly in the trilogy (or unfinished tetralogy) Les Chemins de la liberté (The Roads to Freedom) that Sartre identifies himself most clearly with his main character, Mathieu.