ABSTRACT
From 1938, with the publication of Nausea, until 1952 when he abandoned the fourth volume of Roads of Freedom, Jean-Paul Sartre was known as much as an author of fiction as he was a philosopher. Sartre’s fiction serves the same goal as his philosophy. Several translation issues dog Sartre’s major work of fiction in English. A year after Nausea made its appearance, Sartre published a collection of five short stories. The title of the original French edition of the collection was Le mur, named after the first of the five stories. In Being and Nothingness Sartre says “the principal result” of existentialist thought is “to make us repudiate the spirit of seriousness”. Sartre’s last piece of fiction shows an individual who is not caught in an alien, ultimately incomprehensible world, but one who is able to emerge, from the lucidity that Existentialism cultivates, into actions that aim at changing the world.
