Le Mur Reading Order

Le Mur (The Wall, 1939) by Jean-Paul Sartre is a collection of five short stories published the year after La Nausée, and together they constitute Sartre's most concentrated demonstration of what existentialist fiction looks like in practice. The title story is the most famous: three men condemned to death by a Nationalist firing squad during the Spanish Civil War spend a night in a cell, and the story is about how the knowledge of imminent death transforms the experience of being alive — the body becomes grotesque, the past becomes meaningless, and ordinary human concerns (a woman's jealousy, a political cause) seem absurd. The protagonist, Pablo Ibbieta, is given the chance to save himself by revealing the hiding place of a fugitive he knows; he gives a false location as a joke, and the joke accidentally turns out to be true, and he is freed. The collection's other stories — 'Intimité,' 'La Chambre,' 'Érostrate,' 'L'Enfance d'un chef' — are equally rigorous studies of bad faith, of people who refuse to acknowledge their freedom and construct elaborate self-deceiving explanations for their choices. 'L'Enfance d'un chef,' the longest and most complex, follows the formation of a fascist — showing, with great psychological precision, how the refusal to take responsibility for one's identity leads to the embrace of a group identity that makes all decisions in advance.