ABSTRACT
Autobiographies command arguably even more attention for the exceptionally visible individuals who truly meet the exacting standards of the genre. It is safe to say that in the United States, biography is a valued genre in the field of non-fictional literary writing. The attachment to freedom and Jean-Paul Sartre’s chosen terrain of biography as the arena in which its value can best be established also illuminate an inherent and vital ethical component in Sartre’s philosophy. Sartre’s biographies are also fiction, novels albeit “true” novels, a happy oxymoron whose precise epistemological status is not at all Sartre’s problem. For Sartre, the ego or the self does not exist in any a priori form as a stable source of identity or a secure repository for our knowledge about the world; on the contrary, it is perpetually ungraspable, a problematic construct of consciousness and a haven of bad faith.
