Sartre made freedom and personal responsibility the burden of his resistance allegory
Evidence
Camus had his Sisyphus; Sartre took his parable from the story of Orestes, hero of the Oresteia plays of Aeschylus. Orestes returns to his home town of Argos to find that his mother Clytemnestra has conspired with her lover Aegisthus to kill her husband, Orestes’ father King Agamemnon. Aegisthus now rules as a tyrant over the oppressed citizenry. In Sartre’s version, the populace is too paralysed by humiliation to be capable of rebelling. A plague of flies swarming over the city represents their demoralisation and shame. … Orestes is hounded out of town by the flies, who now represent the classical Furies. The god Zeus appears and offers to drive the Furies away, but Sartre’s Orestes refuses his help. As an existentialist hero, rebelling against tyranny and taking on the weight of personal responsibility, he prefers to act freely and alone. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 511
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to Camus’s Sisyphus myth and to the Oresteia; also resonates with the reader’s interest in how WWII resistance shaped existentialist ethics, a theme running through the whole book. — connects to: Sartre wrote philosophy in literary, novelistic form centered on human freedom — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 25; Sartre reframed freedom as a demand for responsibility born of nuclear-age self-knowledge — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 41; Sartre novelized existential freedom through collective crisis in The Reprieve — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 403 (+10 more)
Broader Connections
- Sartre’s late thought shifted from individual freedom toward political commitment
#qualifies(0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 853 - The war drove Sartre from individualist freedom toward Marxist social determinism
#qualifies(0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 525 - Sartre grounds all value in an unjustified, self-legitimizing freedom
#expands(0.72) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 185