A review by wolfiedude14
The Reprieve, by Jean-Paul Sartre
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
informative
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
4.5
It was interesting of Sartre to choose an event preceding World War 2 that wouldn't actually culminate in its beginning. It allows us to watch all these characters come to terms with this impending destiny-like event, watch them all consider their lives as geared toward a particular fate, only to drop every facet of that thinking as soon as war seems to be avoided.
Once again, Sartre is concerned with freedom, but unlike in his early novel Nausea, and even to some extent the previous novel in this trilogy The Age of Reason, he seems to afford characters a lot more development and interaction, hence the choice to use a very slipstream narrative that jumps between characters and narrative style, third person to first person, focalised to complete blurs in specificity. Not only does this add very much to this dizzying sense of humanity slurring together, it fits also with the daze of the heatwave and the fear of something concretely happening, a fear that grows until it becomes something you instead desire—let something happen, even if it be war.
This realm of being in-the-world is something I think Sartre progressively develops, and is important as a whole for his philosophy. It's an important contribution not just to literature, showing that pages and pages of a single character thinking in this solipsistic manner isn't the only way to go, but also going to highlight the significance of what creates the "Cartesian Subject" as it were. It isn't sitting in an isolated room by a fire and thinking that affords us the world and what to think about; it is others that afford us ourselves
Once again, Sartre is concerned with freedom, but unlike in his early novel Nausea, and even to some extent the previous novel in this trilogy The Age of Reason, he seems to afford characters a lot more development and interaction, hence the choice to use a very slipstream narrative that jumps between characters and narrative style, third person to first person, focalised to complete blurs in specificity. Not only does this add very much to this dizzying sense of humanity slurring together, it fits also with the daze of the heatwave and the fear of something concretely happening, a fear that grows until it becomes something you instead desire—let something happen, even if it be war.
This realm of being in-the-world is something I think Sartre progressively develops, and is important as a whole for his philosophy. It's an important contribution not just to literature, showing that pages and pages of a single character thinking in this solipsistic manner isn't the only way to go, but also going to highlight the significance of what creates the "Cartesian Subject" as it were. It isn't sitting in an isolated room by a fire and thinking that affords us the world and what to think about; it is others that afford us ourselves