Beauvoir’s memory of the contract scene encodes entrapment imagery contradicting its stated freedom

Evidence

There was a kind of balustrade which served as a back-rest, a little way out from the wall; and in the cagelike space behind it a cat was miaowing. The poor thing was too big to get out; how had it ever got in? A woman came and fed the cat some meat. And Sartre said, ‘Let’s sign a two-year lease.’ … Confinement, entrapment, distress, the tossing of charitable scraps: this is terrifying imagery for a story supposedly about freedom. It sounds like an ominous dream sequence. Did it really happen this way, or did she flesh out the memory with symbolic detail? — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 381

Categorization

• FICTION: The trapped-cat-in-a-cage detail during a scene about a ‘freedom’ contract is a perfect bit of unreliable-narrator texture — the symbolic detail undercutting the surface meaning.
• CANDY: A trapped cat in a cage meowing while two philosophers sign a two-year relationship ‘lease’ in the Tuileries is an inherently vivid, shareable scene.
• XREF: connects to: Postwar Beauvoir reconceived freedom as porous and constrained by situation. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 499

Broader Connections

• Postwar Beauvoir reconceived freedom as porous and constrained by situation. #expands (0.75) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 499