Chemins de la liberté, Les. Unfinished trilogy of novels, composed and published by Sartre in the 1940s. Its setting is France at the onset of World War II. Les Chemins is a more technically ambitious work than La Nausée; it interweaves a variety of different viewpoints in a form of subjective third-person narrative, similar in some ways to Flaubert's style indirect libre. In the first volume, L'Âge de raison (1945), the perspective changes from chapter to chapter throughout the account of a 48-hour period; in volume 2, Le Sursis (1945), the timespan is a week, but the viewpoint shifts more rapidly, moving sometimes within a single phrase from one character's perspective to another's. This narrative technique, used here to stress the simultaneity of different reactions to the early years of the war and the phoney peace of 1940, was probably influenced by the American novelist John Dos Passos. 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. Necessarily lived as unique, the events are common to all. Volume 3, La Mort dans l'âme (1949), reverts to a slower pace of perspectival change.
L'Âge de raison is less experimental than Le Sursis but thematically richer. It shows the quest of Mathieu, a university teacher, for the money to pay for his lover Marcelle's illegal abortion. Mathieu is an exemplary failure as an Existentialist, obsessed with freedom to the extent that he will never commit himself to anything [see Engagement]. The two days of his search bring him into contact with a variety of characters: the weak Marcelle, whose opinion on her accidental pregnancy he never seeks; the homosexual Daniel, trapped in his own essentialist vision of his nature; his brother Jacques, a contemptible bourgeois in Mathieu's eyes, who none the less has an uncannily clear insight into the reasons underlying Mathieu's reluctance to commit himself; his student Ivich, with whom he is infatuated, and whose gratuitous, adolescent freedom he covets; his old friend Brunet, a Communist, who is Mathieu's counterpart in that he has accepted the sacrifice of his freedom for the sake of full political commitment. Les Chemins shows a wide spectrum of existential positions, none of them fully authentic, all of them familiar options, in the vivid setting of wartime Paris.
[Christina Howells]
