Background
In April 1938, Sartre's first novel ''Characters
* Mathieu Delarue – an unmarried philosophy professor whose principal wish (like Sartre's) is to remain free * Marcelle – Mathieu's pregnant mistress * Daniel – a homosexual friend of both Mathieu and Marcelle * Boris – a student of Mathieu * Ivich – Boris' sister, to whom Mathieu is attracted * Brunet – Mathieu's Communist friend * Gomez – a painter, who is fighting with the Republicans in Spain * Sarah – Gomez's Jewish wifeOverview of the series
"The first novel, ''L'âge de raison'' (1945; The Age of Reason), centers on philosophy student Mathieu Delarue's uncertainty over whether to devote himself to his pregnant mistress or to his political party. The second volume, ''Le sursis'' (1945, ''The Reprieve''), explores the ramifications of the appeasement pact that Great Britain and France signed with Nazi Germany in 1938. In the third book, ''La mort dans l'âme'' (1949; ''Troubled Sleep'', published in Great Britain as ''Iron in the Soul''), Delarue ends his indecisiveness by attempting to defend a village under attack from the Germans. Although he is apparently killed, Delarue expresses his ultimate freedom through his bravery." The second part of ''Troubled Sleep'' focuses on Mathieu's communist friend Brunet in the POW camp. ''Drôle d'amitié'' (''Strange Friendship'') also focuses on Brunet, and his fellow prisoner Schneider, in the POW camp. In the final part, ''La dernière chance'' (''The Last Chance''), it is revealed that Mathieu was in fact not previously killed: he reappears in a stalag after two months in the hospital.Shifting viewpoints within the novels
In ''L'âge de raison'', "the perspective changes from chapter to chapter throughout the account of a 48-hour period. In volume 2, ''Le Sursis'', the time-span is a week, but the viewpoint shifts more rapidly, moving sometimes within a single phrase from one character's perspective to another's... The lack of punctuation, the juxtaposition of perspectives, and the intensity created by the single focus of a multiplicity of characters work together to convey the common humanity and intersubjective experience of the French on the verge of war... Volume 3, ''La mort dans l'âme'', reverts to a slower pace of perspectival change." As for the experimental style of ''The Reprieve'', Sartre wrote in 1945: :: "I tried to take advantage of the experiments in technique that certain writers of simultaneity, like Dos Passos and Virginia Woolf, have undertaken. I took up their question at the very point where they had let it lie, and I tried to uncover something new along this path. The reader will say whether or not I've succeeded." Of the first two books in the series, Sartre once said: ::"My intention was to write a novel about freedom. I wanted to retrace the path followed by some people and social groups between 1938 and 1944... I decided to tell ''The Age of Reason'' in an ordinary way, by simply showing the structured relationships that link a few individuals. But then come the days of September 1938, and all the barriers collapse... In ''The Reprieve'' we'll find again all the characters of ''The Age of Reason,'' but now they are lost in a crowd."Interpretation
Overall, "the Roads to Freedom as a trilogy reflects many of Sartre's best-known existentialist concepts, including bad faith, or self-deception, the acknowledgment of freedom that comes with both anguish and personal responsibility for one's actions, and how those actions embody the personal and social morality that one promotes." In his book ''Sartre and Fiction,'' Gary Cox discusses the implications of the ''Roads to Freedom'' series: ::''The Age of Reason...'' grew alongside ''Being and Nothingness'' for several years and echoes many of its central themes, particularly the themes of freedom, responsibility and being-for-others... ::It was not to the war that Sartre turned for inspiration for the first volume of his trilogy, but to prewar Paris of the summer of 1938.... ''The Age of Reason'' is not nostalgic about the years between the wars. Rather it casts a detached and objective eye on a group of largely pathetic, emotionally immature characters who are too self-absorbed to really notice or care about the gathering clouds of war that will soon change their narrow little lives beyond recognition. With the coming of war Sartre began to change from a thinker preoccupied with the personal into a very political animal.... ::''The Reprieve'' was written while the Germans occupied Paris ... It covers the eight days from 23 to 30 September leading up to the controversial Munich Agreement... With ''The Reprieve'' politics and history enter the trilogy with a vengeance, although events are not unfolded in the form of an abstract historical account but via myriad personal perspectives. ::''Iron in the Soul'' (a.k.a. ''Troubled Sleep'') is set in June 1940, 21 months after the events of ''The Reprieve.'' The central historical theme of the novel is the defeat of France by the Germans, and certainly a major source of inspiration for the novel was Sartre's capture and imprisonment by German forces in June 1940.... Mathieu makes a brief fifteen-minute stand against the Nazis ... that is all but futile in military terms, but for him it is an uncompromising and decisive act that is the ultimate affirmation of his freedom ... Here Mathieu achieves authenticity... ::The final 120 pages of the novel shift the focus to the communist Brunet in the POW camp. Brunet sees the game of French captives and German captors as another symptom of the evils of capitalism and nationalism, evils that will continue when this particular war is over unless ordinary people of whatever nationality can win the class struggle.The unfinished fourth volume, ''The Last Chance''
In 1981 a text of ''La dernière chance'' was published in French with Sartre's complete works of fiction in the Pléiade edition. George H. Bauer and Michel Contat had painstakingly reconstructed the intended novel from Sartre's "completely unorganized manuscript pages." In their "Critical Note on ''The Last Chance,''" the authors note: "Let us also add that Sartre had come to be aware of the work we were doing on his drafts, and that he allowed it." In 2009, Craig Vasey translated and published this work into English. Vasey's edition, titled ''The Last Chance: Roads of Freedom IV,'' includes two parts: 1) ''Strange Friendship'' (''Drôle d'amitié'') – the two chapters which were previously published in 1949 in Sartre's magazine ''Les Temps modernes;'' and 2) ''The Last Chance'' (''La dernière chance'') – the text reconstructed by Bauer and Contat from Sartre's notes. This is the first time that these two parts have been available in English.Why Sartre did not finish the series
Sartre's biographer Ronald Hayman theorized that one reason Sartre did not finish the ''Roads to Freedom'' series was that Sartre "deeply disliked bringing anything to a conclusion." Hayman pointed out that although Sartre "managed to complete nine original plays, seven short stories, and several screenplays, nearly all his other major projects in literature and philosophy were abandoned." These included the planned sequels to ''Nausea,'' ''Being and Nothingness,'' and ''Critique of Dialectical Reason,'' and "other uncompleted projects including the autobiography, the enormous biography of Flaubert, ''La Psyché'' (a phenomenological psychology), a book on Mallarmé, one on Tintoretto," etc. As for the ''Roads to Liberty,'' Sartre "had relatively little difficulty in completing the first three volumes: nothing needed to be concluded. He wrote 223 pages of the last volume, ''La derniere chance,'' and he did not give up hope of finishing it until nine years after publishing the third volume in the series." According to Hayman, one reason for Sartre's unfinished projects was his restlessness: when Sartre "worked at long-term projects, it was tarnished by ambivalence. Other work would be clamoring for his time, and simultaneously he would feel guilty about enjoying words instead of taking action." Simone de Beauvoir is quoted as saying, "Without having abandoned the idea of a fourth volume, he always found work that needed his attention more." For another possible interpretation, Hayman goes on to quote the writer Michael Scriven, who said that Sartre was "shattering the myth of the coherently finished text, the myth that the contradictions that gave rise to the work have been resolved by an apparently cohesive textual narrative." Michel Contat, in his "General Introduction for ''Roads of Freedom,''" points out that Sartre was no longer in the right frame of mind. His experience had become "extremely restricted and particularized. It became the experience of a man of letters, a celebrity intellectual, who, apart from his old circle of friends, almost only encounters people like himself, even when he goes abroad." Also, the reviews of the last novel in the series, ''Troubled Sleep,'' had not been good. Contat further suggests that "it is in developing the idea, near the end of 1953, of an autobiography that Sartre decides – or rather that the decision takes place in him – to leave his novel where it is, for this new project represents a way out of the dead-end in which he finds himself with the novel." In an interview in 1973 concerning ''The Roads to Freedom'', Sartre revealed at least one of the reasons he discontinued the series: :What is fundamentally false about a novel in which one constructs a character based on oneself is precisely that he is not ''really'' you. The differences you put into him, and which seem of no decisive significance at the outset, end up throwing him into falseness. In ''The Age of Reason'', I gave Mathieu everything of mine—I don't mean the facts of life, but his character—except the essential thing, which is that I lived in order to write. There is something radically false in an autobiographical novel, namely that it's straddling: it is neither completely a novel, nor completely an autobiography. But that's something I did not want to see at the time because I did not want to abandon the novel, and I could not write without making use of my own life.Adaptation
The novel series was adapted into a thirteen-part television serial by David Turner forReferences
External links
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Roads to Freedom Novel sequences Novels by Jean-Paul Sartre BBC television dramas