ABSTRACT
Through their shared but not entirely identical manipulation of the novel's capacity for 'lucid bewilderment', Victor Hugo and Jean-Paul Sartre keenly explore what it means to be free. These situations present both Hugo and Sartre with the opportunity to foreground the link between human freedom and individual engagement. They use their characters to play out dilemmas which are not only the results of social conditions and historical forces, but which also help shape that same milieu through the characters themselves. For the protagonists of these novels, freedom and obligation are ever present, complicating their involvement with the world around them. Quasimodo and Mathieu Delarue long to connect with their existence, but neither can ignore how they will never be locked in a determined relationship to it. In opposition to these characters stand the two antagonists of each novel, who desperately try to halt the dialectics of being out of a fear of the insecurity that it creates.
