Sartre, Jean-Paul | Alexander J. Argyros (essay date 1988)
Alexander J. Argyros (essay date 1988)
SOURCE: "The Sense of Ending: Sartre's 'The Wall'," in Modern Language Studies, Vol. XVIII, No. 3, Summer, 1988, pp. 46-52.
[In the following essay, Argyros responds to critics who consider the conclusion of the story "The Wall" flawed by arguing that Sartre's ironic ending is a "result of the marriage of the theoretical presuppositions of existentialism with the rules of narrative prose."]
Many readers of Sartre, both admirers and detractors, view the ending of his short story "The Wall" as a flaw. Two examples will illustrate this rather widely held opinion. Paul P. Somers Jr., in an article denigrating Sartre in comparison to Camus, argues: "In discussing Sartre's capacity for irony, we should keep in mind the sledge-hammer obviousness of the trick ending in his short story "The Wall" (The French Review, Vol. xlii, No. 5, April 1969). A much more favorably inclined Maurice Cranston...
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