The Writing of Jean Paul Sartre and the Narratives of his Being at War

Abstract

This article proposes the joint analysis of three representative texts in the biographical, fictional and theoretical work of the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre. The personal experience that crosses the whole analysis is Sartre’s participation during Second World War as a military auxiliary. Thus, in this article, we reflect about the way in which writing is a practice and also a fundamental space to reconstruct memory, and how writing shapes the writer’s existential dimension and his place regarding the experience. The category “being in the world”, proposed by Heidegger and reinterpreted by Sartre, allows us to understand the function that writing has in the construction and narration of existence.