Sartre

remark about his childhood experience of the “necessity” of the plot’s
unfolding in the movie that leads him to realize the “contingence” of the
world as he leaves the theater.^35 Years later he will write that “it is not
determinism but fatalism that is the inverse of freedom.”^36 His explan-
ation remains the common view that determinism is retrospective
whereas fate is prospective; the former postdictive, the latter predictive;
the one robs us of our past, the other of our future. Freedom and fate will
receive considerable attention in his next novel.
We cannot fail to mention a final concern of Sartre’s that surfaces in
this early work, namely, the conflict of Good and Evil. It will discomfort
the moralist throughout his life.^37 Amidst an obscure sense of Evil
having assumed substantial character and gathered like a gigantic wave
carrying along all the world’s suffering, while projecting a weak image of
the Good, Fre ́de ́ric “eagerly pursues this dull pleasure of feeling himself
predestined to suffering. ‘I have no right to that’ he says to himself, ‘it’s
metaphysics.’ But on that day [the narrator assures us] he discovered
with fright the mystical depth of his nature” (EJ 282 – 283 ). We are not
far from Roquentin’s “mystical” insights into his own contingency, as he
meditates on the tree root, in that famous passage fromNausea.

Er, the Armenian

Written the next year, this was a creative commentary on Plato’s “The
Myth of Er” (Republic, bookx) enriched by generous use of the battle of
the gods and the giants described in Hesiod’sTheogony. It too represents

(^35) See above,Chapter 1.
(^36) The Imaginary, trans. Jonathan Webber (London: Routledge, 2004 ), 47 and 169.
(^37) Toward the end ofTranscendence of the Ego, Sartre defends phenomenology against accus-
ations from the Left of being an idealism that drowns reality in a flood of ideas. He responds:
“If idealism is the philosophy without evil of Monsieur Brunschvicg; if it’s the philosophy
where the effort of spiritual assimilation never encounters any external resistance, where
suffering, famine and war are diluted in a slow process of the unification of ideas, then
nothing is more unjust than to call phenomenologists idealists” (“La Transcendence de l’ego”
et autres textes phe ́nome ́nologiques: “Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi,” precede de “Une ide ́e
fondamentale de la phe ́nome ́nologie de Husserl”[Paris: Vrin, 2003 ], 104 /F 130 ; hereafterTE
with detail of French original essay where required.) This certainly resonates with Sartre’s
insistence inWhat is Literature?that “Evil cannot be redeemed” (Jean-Paul Sartre,What is
Literature? And Other Essays, intro. Steven Ungar [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1988 ], 180 ; hereafterWL. Sitii: 248 ).
32 An elite education: student, author, soldier, teacher