Sartre novelized existential freedom through collective crisis in The Reprieve

Evidence

Sartre would try to capture the mood of the crisis in The Reprieve, the second volume of his Roads of Freedom sequence — not published until 1945, but set during the crucial week of 23–30 September 1938. Each of his characters struggles to adjust to the idea that their future may be curtailed and that nothing will be the same again. Sartre slips from one person’s thoughts to another’s, in a stream-of-consciousness method borrowed from the novels of John Dos Passos and Virginia Woolf. The young character Boris (based on Sartre’s former student Jacques-Laurent Bost) calculates how long he is likely to survive in the army when war begins, and thus how many omelettes he can expect to eat before dying. In a crucial moment, as everyone gathers to hear Hitler speak on the radio, Sartre draws back from the scene to show us all of France, then all of Germany, and all of Europe. ‘A hundred million free consciousnesses, each aware of walls, the glowing stump of a cigar, familiar faces, and each constructing its destiny on its own responsibility.’ — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 403

Categorization

• XREF: The omelette-counting and ‘a hundred million free consciousnesses’ moment could pair with Sartre’s own philosophical claims about individual freedom against historical forces, and with the broader Roads of Freedom trilogy mentioned elsewhere in existentialism histories. — connects to: Surveillance, data farming, and revived conflict renew the case for existentialist freedom. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 97; Sartre made freedom and personal responsibility the burden of his resistance allegory — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 511; Historical crisis enables the existential self to be freed from individualism
• SEED: An essay angle: how novelists translated collective historical dread into individual quantified anxieties — Boris counting omelettes before dying as a literary portrait of Heideggerian being-toward-death made mundane.

Broader Connections

• Sartre made freedom and personal responsibility the burden of his resistance allegory #corroborates (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 511