Varoluşçu Bir Özyaşamöyküsü: Sartre'in Sözcükleri

Abstract

The distinctions of related genres, “the autobiography” and the definition that Phillipe Lejeune propose, allowing us to perceive the characteristics of this retrospective genre which hardly exists for two centuries. Though “The words” had been published in 1964 and remains the only autobiography declared of Sartre, it presents an incipit quite opposed to the typical narration of the genre. It is really concerned as an autobiography, because, the autobiographical pact is proclaimed in the text itself and in all of the epitext. This retrospective narration, where the author evokes his childhood memories up to 11 years old, appears as an “ulterior narration” where the author-narration attemps to recapture the facts of his earliest childhood which is set in a intellectual, lower middle circle which will have a large influence on training and vocation of the author. Seeing that the narrator and character are as one, and the temporal distance between the adult narrator who remembers and the child who he has been is great, the narratives techniques used in the book should be taken into consideration.From another source, the Sartre autobiography displays the characteristics desires of an existentialist novel: realizing himself, realisation of his place as an individual in the perception that he has of the world and in the action that he exerts on the world, giving a narrative form to his own world’s experience “giving others a truth of oneself that it could be indicative of the truth of all” . In this work, it’s possible to mark out, the self-consciousness of “the being nothing” connected to the apparent absurdity of the human existence. The one of the charm of text lies in the paradoxical mixture of complicity and hostility that the author exhibits towards the child who he was.