The Wall (Sartre short story collection)

• 1. Introduction

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  Jean-Paul Sartre published The Wall in 1939, a collection of five short stories. The title story is widely regarded as one of Sartre's greatest achievements in existentialist fiction. Four of the collection's five stories had already appeared in French journals before this book brought them together with one new title piece. Sartre dedicated the book to his companion Olga Kosakiewicz, a former student of Simone de Beauvoir.

  What happens to a man's convictions in his final hours? How far can obsession bend a person's grip on reality? And what turns a privileged boy into a violent ideologue instead of someone else?

• 2. The Wall

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  Pablo Ibbieta shares a cell with two other men, all three sentenced to die by firing squad. The story's title points at the wall those firing squads use, the last object each condemned man will face. Sartre uses it as a symbol of how certain, and yet how unknowable, death remains until the moment it arrives.

  The story is set during the Spanish Civil War, which ran from the 18th of July 1936 to the 1st of April 1939. That war ended when Nationalist forces, led by General Francisco Franco, defeated the Spanish Republic and entered Madrid.

  Pablo is offered a way out if he gives up the location of his comrade, Ramón Gris. He refuses for most of his remaining hours, telling himself he no longer cares about his cause or his own life. Just before his execution, seeing what looks like no harm in it, he sends the authorities to a hideout he believes is false. Ramón Gris, though, has already left his old hiding place for the very spot Pablo just named. Gris is shot there, and Pablo's life is spared, at least for now.

  In 1967, this story became the basis of a film released under the same title, The Wall.

• 3. The Room

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  Mme Darbédat is confined to her room by an unnamed illness, spending her bedridden days remembering the past and eating rahat-loukoums. Her husband, M. Darbédat, visits every week. On one visit, he learns that their daughter Ève refuses to commit her husband Pierre to an asylum, despite his apparent insanity. Mme Darbédat hints that Ève and Pierre still share a romantic intimacy, a suggestion that only angers her husband further.

  M. Darbédat decides to visit Ève himself. The narrative then shifts from the 'sane' household of the Darbédats into Pierre's 'sick', perverse inner world. After witnessing some of Pierre's strange, abnormal behavior firsthand, M. Darbédat cannot convince Ève to send him away. He wants Pierre, whom he calls the 'madman', committed to a Dr Franchot's clinic, but Ève refuses, and he leaves in helpless frustration.

  Pierre, it turns out, stays locked in a room he has painted entirely black. He calls his wife 'Agatha' and recounts delusions of time they supposedly spent together in Hamburg. He also keeps a talisman he calls a 'ziuthre' to manage his hallucinations. Ève wants to understand and share in Pierre's psychotic world rather than pull away from it. She experiences it as more authentic than anything in ordinary life, and in choosing it she cuts herself off from that ordinary world.

  Ève watches Pierre hallucinate a swarm of flying, buzzing statues before he finally falls asleep. Watching him rest, she wonders how long it will be before degeneration, bestialization, and utter dementia take hold. The story closes on her resolution, spoken to her sleeping husband: 'Je te tuerai avant,' I'll kill you before that.

• 4. Erostratus

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  The story's narrator, a misanthrope, plans to kill six people, one for each bullet in his revolver. His model is Herostratus, the ancient figure who sought infamy through a single destructive act. Carrying the revolver through the streets in his pocket leaves him exhilarated, filled with a private sense of power.

  'But I no longer drew assurance from that, it was from myself: I was a being like a revolver, a torpedo or a bomb.' He says this of the revolver he carries through the streets.

  Sartre uses the story to trace how a man's sense of self can shift with the objects he possesses. The revolver itself cannot remake the man carrying it, a point the story's ending makes clear.

• 5. Intimacy

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  Young Lulu wants to break free from roles that feel meaningless to her. At her friend Rirette's urging, she decides to leave her husband Henri and run off with her lover Pierre. She moves through several stages of realization, seeing that the roles of wife, friend, and lover carry no real meaning at all. In the end, though, she lacks the strength to turn that anguish into a genuinely authentic life. She chooses to remain with Henri, and the marriage stands exactly as it was before Rirette ever intervened.

• 6. The Childhood of a Leader

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  Groomed from birth to take over the family business, Lucien Fleurier is the son of a rich industrialist. The story follows his mental development from around age four into early adulthood. It traces his search for identity and for some explanation of a persistent sense of alienation.

  By his teenage years, Lucien becomes obsessed with Freudian psychoanalysis. He falls under the influence of an older surrealist, who eventually pressures him into a sexual relationship.

  Lucien eventually finds his answers in the work of the writer Maurice Barrès. He finds community in a fascist youth organization called the Camelots du Roi. He finds a sense of power and self-respect in violent antisemitism. And he finds meaning in the rights and responsibilities that his privileged position in society seems to grant him.

  In 2016, this story likewise became a film, released under the same title, The Childhood of a Leader.