The Roads to Freedom

The Roads to Freedom (French: Les chemins de la liberté ) is an unfinished four-part series of novels by Jean -Paul Sartre on existentialism, the responsibility and the dilemma of commitment, time before and in the Vichy regime. The technically bold, large-scale work, which can also be understood as a confrontation with Joyce, Dos Passos, and Faulkner is, in the period 1945-1949 published ( four volumes German edition put together some 1,150 pages). Michel Contat speaks of a novelistic philosophy.

Subject

The three novels L' âge de raison ( in English The Age of Reason ), Le sursis ( the English translation of The Reprieve covers rather a wide semantic field between deferral / postponement and probation / amnesty from ) and La mort dans l' âme ( in English Troubled Sleep, originally translated to Iron in the Soul ) develop around Mathieu, a socialist philosophy teacher and a group of friends. The trilogy had a fourth novel to follow, Drôle d' amitié, but Sartre failed to complete, only two chapters took shape.

The books were in response to the events of the Second World War and in particular the occupation of France created by the Nazis, and embody certain shifts in the views of the author about the actions ( commitment ) in life and in literature, then in the work L ' existentialisme est un humanisme were reflected, which met in all camps on contradiction.

There are:

• Time of maturity, about youth and self- design of intellectuals Mathieu, in 48 hours, and about June 13, 1938
• The postponement, a vertical panopticon of the collective unconscious in anticipation of the Munich Agreement and
• The thorn in the flesh on the concrete defeat of France and the prisoner in the camp ( refers to Sartre's time in Stalag XII D from 1940 in Trier). The figure Brunet moves more and more into focus.

Sartre began in early 1939 to work on the first volume, so literally wrote in the present tense. In the period that followed, he was himself the uncertainty of war suspended, " the stuck seems ." From one day to the next Sartre in 1945 to mentor and conscience of an entire generation, and looked the other hand, in view of the new world order with altered moral conditions faced. As early as 1959 thought Sartre on the resumption of work on the last chance.

The novel series is discussed as a semi- autobiographical (eg Rowley in Tête -à -tête ) with Mathieu as Sartre and Ivich as Olga Kosakiewicz.

She was also prepared as a thirteen- part television series of the BBC in 1970 with Michael Bryant in the role of Mathieu.

Importance

"Under the situation Sartre understands the totality of what determines human existence from the outside: the body, the social milieu and the historical situation into which he is born. The freedom of man is that he can accept or reject a situation they in this sense also creates. The human being is not only in history, it makes it easy if he now actively or passively to her. "

In technical terms, Sartre emphasizes on the distance from the events completely, thus is also the reader in the moment evoked in its undisturbed relativity and subjectivity. Only in the complex, the postponement may shine through an overview.

The contemporary criticism to the first two volumes acted benevolently, but wanted to wait for the progress, which then grew into a disappointment for Sartre.

The Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, Sartre refused to not let themselves to be taken.

" After rigorous atheists [ Sartre ] man is fully responsible for his actions because the world order of his freedom comes. "