The Wall (book)

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One of Jean-Paul Sartre's greatest existentialist works, The Wall is a book of short stories containing the eponymous story The Wall. The 5 stories (Le mur, Le chambre, Erostrate, Intimate, L'enfance d'un chef) reflect the cruel and absurd experiences Sartre went through as a volunteer during the Spanish Civil War. Volunteers from many nations went to the aid of the Spanish Republicans (including writers George Orwell and Simone Weil) and the defeat of the Republic demoralized the idealists who tried to defeat the fascists. The title story, Le mur coldly documents a story about prisoners who are condemned to death. The lack of emotion, the objectivity and the quiet disgust the narrator feels provide a running theme throughout many of Sartre's later stories. Sartre dedicated the book to Olga Kosakiewicz, a former student of Simone de Beauvoir, his lifelong companion.

1 The Wall
2 The Room
3 Erostratus
4 Intimacy
5 The Childhood of a Leader

[edit] The Wall

(1939) A story about the Spanish Civil War (in Spanish, the Guerra Civil) that began July 17, 1936. It ended March 28, 1939, when Nationalist (known in Spanish as the Nacionales, elsewhere usually referred to as Fascists) troops, led by General Francisco Franco, overcame the Spanish Republic's forces and entered Madrid. The actual wall in the book, which was used by firing squads to execute prisoners, was representative of the knowledge of one's impenetrable and impending death. The protagonist, Pablo Ibbieta, along with two others in his cell, is sentenced to death. He is offered a way out if he betrays the whereabouts of his friend, Ramon Gris. Pablo refuses to until just before his death, when, seeing no harm in it, he gives the authorities some incorrect advice on where they could find Ramon Gris. It turns out that Ramon Gris moved from where Pablo believed him to be to where Pablo described him as being to the authorities. Thus Ramon Gris is shot and Pablo's life is, at least temporarily, spared.

[edit] The Room

A story of a woman who has married and her husband has turned insane. Her whole surrounding urges her to let the man be transported into an asylum, yet she refuses. She cannot return to the normal world, even if she wants to.

[edit] Erostratus

A story about a man who hates other men and then resolutes to follow the path of Herostratos and come into history with an evil deed--in this case, the plot of killing six random people, six because his revolver holds just six bullets.

[edit] Intimacy

This story tells of the mental anguish and nihlistic hole that a young married woman finds herself in. She decides to leave her husband and run off with her lover after the husband mistreats her brother. She goes through a wide range of emotions as she sees the futility in love and life and finally decides to remain with her husband, not out of love, but out of pity and a knowledge that the husband is nothing without her.