Sartre's plays, and especially The Flies, are generally considered to be vulgarizations of his previously elaborated philosophical positions. This assumption is misleading. The Flies is the first work in which Sartre presents what can be taken as an ethics of freedom. Being and Nothingness concerns not ethics but ontology, freedom not as value but as a structure of Being, that essential freedom which makes it possible and meaningful for man existentially to make himself free. In a footnote to the chapter of Being and Nothingness, "Concrete Relations with Others," Sartre indicates that his description of human reality does not exclude "the possibility of an ethics of deliverance and salvation." But, he continues, "this can be achieved only after a radical conversion." Such a radical conversion takes place … in Act II of The Flies; it involves a complete transformation in Orestes' understanding and use of his freedom. In committing murder, Orestes overthrows the moral and religious laws established by Jupiter. He kills Aegistheus and Clytemnestra in the name of his own liberation and that of the people of Argos. He has discovered that there are no a priori values, and that he must therefore bear the anguish of full responsibility for inventing values by his acts. (p. 12)

Clearly, Sartre intends Orestes to convey the idea that "existentialism is a humanism." The ethics of freedom embodied by Orestes involves a humanism that in certain historical situations must express itself in the form of violence. However, there is another aspect to Orestes which confuses his role as heroic liberator and points not to a dramatic richness in the character but to a confusion in Sartre's conception of him. Why does Orestes decide to leave Argos at the end of the play? Part of the reason is that Jupiter wants him to stay and to become ruler of Argos in place of the murdered Aegistheus. Here, as in committing the murder itself, Orestes' choice is defined in exact opposition to Jupiter's will. He says to the people of Argos: "I shall not sit on my victim's throne or take the scepter in my blood-stained hands. A god offered it to me, and I said no." On the other hand, he claims he has killed Aegistheus to liberate the people from their tyrant…. Orestes has freed the people from Aegistheus, but nothing indicates that he has freed them from the slave mentality which made Aegistheus' tyranny possible…. By some mysterious logic, Orestes seems to believe that by liberating himself, he is also liberating "his" people. (pp. 12-13)

In his fascination with the dark destiny he knows will be his, [Orestes] resembles more a romantic force qui va, gloriously doomed, than a liberté en situation. He acts, not with the fear and trembling of an individual who recognizes the risk inherent in every commitment, but with a kind of exalted joy. (p. 13)

The audience of The Flies in 1943 was less interested in the philosophical problems of the play than in its clear political meaning: satire of the Vichy puppets and praise of the Resistance. (p. 15)

The actual killing of Aegistheus and Clytemnestra, foreordained by the legend's tradition, is of secondary importance in Sartre's play…. The central question in the plot of The Flies is not whether Orestes will murder Aegistheus but how he will bear his act: will he take full responsibility for it, or will he abdicate his responsibility and disavow what he has done? The real murder of Aegistheus and Clytemnestra is meaningful only because of the symbolic murder of Jupiter that follows it. (pp. 16-17)

Orestes dramatizes in its most extreme form the power of freedom against tyranny. Sartre wrote his first play as a call to revolt; the freedom which inspires that revolt is meant as a passionate imperative. The Flies remains indispensable to any understanding of what Sartre is about. (p. 24)

Sartre has insisted that it was not his purpose in writing The Devil and the Good Lord to demonstrate that God does not exist. He stopped believing in God when he was twelve years old, he has asserted, and "the problem of God interests me very little."… Sartre deals in this play not so much with God as with all absolutes—Good and Evil, God and the Devil, Heaven and Hell—as evasions from the finitude of existence. (p. 32)

For Sartre freedom and solidarity are facts of human existence. They are also the basis for judgments of value. It is in the individual's awareness of his freedom and his solidarity with other men, in his will to assume responsibility for these facts and to work toward their realization as practical realities, that moral judgments are possible. In both The Flies and The Devil and the Good Lord the hero's conversion involves precisely this kind of awareness. (p. 33)

Like Orestes, Goetz is meant to serve as an example. The audience is supposed to identify with him, to learn from his mistakes and from his final heroic decision. (p. 36)

The evil with which Sartre is concerned in this play has no relation to the evil of which he has been able to speak so powerfully during and since the Occupation. It is a theological principle, by definition impossible to realize. Sartre explains his concept of "pure" evil in Saint Genet: "If he does not abhor Evil, if he does it out of passion, then, as Genet himself says, Evil becomes a Good. In actual fact, the person who loves blood and rape, like the butcher of Hamburg, is a criminal lunatic but not a true evildoer." The only "true evildoer," then, is Satan; no merely human creature is capable of pure evil. Even Faust, who sells his soul to the Devil, does not do evil for its own sake: he wants gold, women, power. It is because he is the Devil that Satan, through Faust, can be evil.

In another sense, too, Goetz's evil does not count as real. He pays no price for what he has done; his acts carry no consequences that limit his future possibilities. With Goetz's conversion, his past evil is erased. (p. 38)

[The Flies and The Devil and the Good Lord are Sartre's] spectacular plays; Orestes and Goetz are his two "heroic" heroes. In both cases, their conversions signify an absolute break with the past. Orestes' conversion, however, occurs early in the play…. For Orestes, the past involves no clearly definable self—that is, in Sartre's terms, no irrevocable action. Consequently, the past does not count heavily in that play's dramatic economy. Just before Orestes' conversion, his self is so light as to be almost nonexistent. This is not true in The Devil and the Good Lord. Goetz's conversion occurs in Act III, scene x; at this point his past should carry a good deal of weight. Man is, for Sartre, to the extent that he has done. Goetz has done many things, all of them with disastrous outcome. But the crimes of Goetz-Evil and the catastrophic mistakes of Goetz-Good never have any weight in themselves; they are simply lessons for Goetz and for the audience. With each metamorphosis Goetz is able to start again tabula rasa. (p. 39)

Goetz suddenly realizes that all his buffoonery has been in vain, that he cannot be anything in the eyes of God because there is no God for him to be for. Sartre would have us believe that this discovery makes of Goetz a completely changed man. This is difficult to believe, even on the basis of Sartre's own theories. His analysis of Genet draws extensively from Freud as well as from Marx; the conditions that define the situation within which Genet makes his choices are psychological as well as social. Sartre emphasizes the continuity underlying even the most radical of Genet's transformations. There is no such continuity in Goetz's conversion. (p. 40)

In The Devil and the Good Lord Sartre fails to create a language capable of embodying his hero's stated transformation. (p. 41)

Ideas in [The Devil and the Good Lord] do not arise from the confrontation of two wills in conflict; they exist as packaged goods compartmentalized within each character…. Goetz at the end of the play is like Faust saved instead of damned. Once he has seen the truth, he is able to take back his pact with the Devil and the Good Lord. (p. 42)

Although the theme of The Victors is heroism, the play has no hero. [There are no spectacular, exemplary individuals as in The Flies or The Devil and the Good Lord who] have the power to act, to change the world in which they find themselves. The five Resistance fighters in The Victors have no such power; things happen to them but they cannot make things happen. Evil in this play is not a metaphysical or theological idea as it is in The Devil and the Good Lord. The emphasis is on an extreme situation: torture. (p. 43)

Each of Sartre's Resistance fighters in The Victors is an exploration of one possible answer to the question: If they tortured me, what would I do? The maquisards are trapped in a closed situation in which action is no longer available to them. There is only suffering; all they can choose is the meaning of that suffering. They are defined not as personalities but in relation to their ordeal: to the threat of torture and to torture itself. In this situation, the problem of freedom is posed in a radical form. Each man must choose the attitude with which he will confront his torturers. Even under torture he is free since he must decide the exact moment he can no longer stand the pain, and what he will do at that moment. (p. 44)

One has to agree with Sartre that The Victors is less than successful. It fails for several reasons: the unsuitability of torture on the stage, the sketchy characterization of the torturers, the victims' failure to behave in such a way that the dramatic illusion is maintained. Its legitimate achievement is its presentation of the contest between torturer and tortured and its study of the fanatic pride that is part of heroism. (p. 52)

Although almost all critics of Dirty Hands have referred to [the protagonist] Hugo as a Hamlet-like character, the comparison does not take us very far, in spite of Hugo's long drunken tirade—"To be or not to be, eh? You see what I mean"—the worst speech in the play. Hamlet intellectually dominates every contest; Hugo always comes out a loser. He is bested by all the other characters…. Hugo is supposed to be lucid, but actually his lucidity operates only on his own inadequacies; he has little understanding of the events in which he wants to play a role.

As a psychological study …, Hugo is complex and interesting—one of the most fully realized characters in Sartre's plays. As spokesman for the moral position, however, he carries no weight at all. We are given psychological problems parading as legitimate moral dilemmas. (p. 59)

The real interest of Dirty Hands lies in the delineation of its three main characters: Hugo, Jessica, and Hoederer. None of them is reducible to an idea; in spite of the social issues involved, they communicate an immediacy and concreteness which makes us experience them also as private persons, a rare phenomenon in Sartre's plays. Sartre's portrait of Hugo, especially, involves an intimacy of understanding which Sartre does not usually give to his dramatic creations. He reveals Hugo from within, Hugo as he is for himself, with all the hesitations and blurs that such a portrait involves…. Hugo's wife Jessica, usually ignored or dismissed by critics, shows [a] kind of believable unpredictability of intelligence and emotion…. Hoederer, although an entirely admirable character, is neither stiff nor unconvincing. It is the three-way relationship between Hugo, Hoederer, and Jessica which finally makes the play interesting. (pp. 64-5)

In Hugo, Sartre explores many of the themes he deals with less successfully in Orestes and Goetz; Hugo stands as Sartre's modern humanized version of his two mythical heroes. Like them Hugo finds himself isolated, belonging to no collectivity he can experience as "we" instead of "they" and, as a result, suffers from a constant feeling of unreality…. In common with his larger, more heroic counterparts, Hugo is primarily concerned not with practical consequences, but with a justification for his existence: the salvation of his soul. All three characters need to be seen in order to be sure they exist: Orestes by the people of Argos, Hugo by his comrades in the Party, Goetz by God. They act not for ends, but for spectators. For this reason, the most extreme and irrevocable form of action—murder—becomes their chosen means of acceding to reality, of forcing "them," Sartre's Autrui, to take their presence into account. (p. 66)

Hoederer is the one authentic hero of Sartre's plays, the one fully admirable character. His behavior has nothing in common with the flamboyant heroism of Orestes and Goetz, slaying their respective Gods; his concerns are practical objectives in a world of men. Orestes and Goetz must go through the "baptism of blood" before they can feel themselves free. Their ends, we are told, are noble; but we see only the means. Hoederer is more modest. Orestes and Goetz fight dragons; Hoederer simply gets work done. He represents Sartre's more sober ideal of political action…. (p. 73)

Although Sartre reveals Hugo from several points of view, giving the spectator the impression of complete familiarity, Hoederer remains elusive, constantly suggesting a complexity which never shows itself fully. It is significant that Hoederer is able to see Hugo, to understand what is going on inside Hugo's head, but for Hugo Hoederer always remains opaque, impenetrable. (p. 74)

It is Jessica who finally acts as catalyst of what we have known will be Hoederer's inevitable fate. Hugo kills Hoederer after Hoederer's one moment of weakness, the brief lapse in his will to stay away from Jessica and to ignore her insistent offer of herself. Hoederer's words to Slick and George after Hugo has shot him are characteristic: "Don't hurt him. He was jealous…. I've been sleeping with his wife"…. Hoederer's final act of generosity is a lie.

Why does Hugo kill Hoederer? Hugo is his act; all that he has been, all his failures are synthesized in that one explosion. Whatever Hugo initially thought his intentions were, his real intentions are revealed by the fact of the murder itself. In Being and Nothingness Sartre makes a distinction between the motif and the mobile of an action. He defines motif as the objective grasp of a situation, the understanding of how it can serve as a means for attaining a particular end. Mobile, on the other hand, refers to the psychological factors that motivate an act.

Hugo's initial motif was to assassinate Hoederer in order to eliminate a political enemy. This long-deliberated motif, however, has nothing to do with the crime as it actually happens. Hugo does not kill for political reasons or because his Party has ordered him to kill. In killing Hoederer, it is himself as a failure Hugo wants to kill. He hopes by a single act, a pistol shot, to inaugurate a future that signifies the destruction of his past. In fact he does just the opposite. Had he taken Hoederer's advice and accepted his help, Hugo's past would have become just a painful adolescent stage, the prelude to his manhood; with the act of murder, that past becomes a radical truth of his present and future. Each shot is the despairing confession of his complete alienation, his inability to escape from the prison of his childhood, his solitude, and his weakness. It is an admission that he cannot in any other way win the confidence of his comrades or respect from his wife. Only a dead body can make him feel that he has marked the world. (pp. 74-5)

Finally, after all the meanings of Hugo's crime have been explained into absurdity, all that remains is the act itself and its result—the dead body of Hoederer. Notwithstanding Hugo's long-planned intention, the crime as it takes place is unpremeditated. Hugo kills for no real reason; what happens is almost an accident, like Meursault's killing of the Arab because the sun was in his eyes…. He experiences what he has done as an act without an agent; for himself he is still only Hugo the actor, who happened to have real bullets in his play gun. (pp. 76-7)

Dirty Hands, like The Victors, is in a particular realistic tradition; it deals in a serious, nonmythical way with a contemporary crisis…. Dirty Hands avoids both the cerebralism and the sheer physical horror that weaken The Victors. Its intimate realism is entirely suited to the action of the play. Hugo's initial mission of assassinating an ideological adversary becomes the very different task of killing Hoederer; what begins for Hugo as an abstraction—the problem of "red gloves"—changes into the terrible demand that he kill the one man who is willing to have confidence in him, who can help him, and whom he has grown to love in spite of himself…. Dirty Hands is less original than No Exit before it, less powerful than The Condemned of Altona after it. But it is the first play we have considered that escapes Sartre's great fault of sterilizing his drama with rhetoric; it inhabits a world to which we can give imaginative assent. (p. 78)

The defect of [The Respectful Prostitute] is that it vacillates uncertainly between realism and caricature. The Respectful Prostitute is meant to be an aggressive work, using ridicule as denunciation. Sartre, however, is unsure of his weapons…. We cannot recognize the characters as credible persons; nor is their distortion such that we can assent to it as functional caricature. (p. 85)

Both Sartre's satires, The Respectful Prostitute and Nekrassov, are weakened by the scene in which the play's action takes its crucial turn. In all Sartre's dramatic work the turning point occurs as a climactic confrontation between protagonist and antagonist. Only in Kean, whose plot Sartre has taken from Dumas père, is there no such scene. Sartre's serious plays are constructed in such a way that this scene is a life-and-death contest between opposing wills…. In his two satires, Sartre keeps the climactic confrontation scene but, in both cases, uses it for edification rather than for comic effect. In The Respectful Prostitute, the awkward semirealism of Lizzie's contest with the Senator makes of her abdication a sentimental melodrama. In Nekrassov, too, Sartre cannot find the right tone for his scene of confrontation, primarily because he has used an irrelevant character to bring the turning point about; the contest to which Nekrassov's structure has been leading us finally takes place not between Valéra and Palotin, but between Valéra and Veronique. (pp. 93-4)

When Sartre stays with his original intention of writing a satiric farce, he creates scenes of frequently brilliant comic technique…. Sartre does not want us puzzled by his comic types; he wants us to recognize them immediately so we can focus our interest on what happens to them. Except for Valéra and Veronique, who exist on a different level of reality, the characters in Nekrassov are deliberately simplified [and consistently successful]…. (p. 95)

The pathétique of Kean's situation as victim of society is of less interest to Sartre than the analysis of that situation [in Kean]. Kean, like Nekrassov, is a mystifier of society. Both protagonists, the actor and the adventurer, make their livelihood by pretending that they are what they are not. Each discovers that it is he who has been mystified, forced by society into a role which does not permit him to exist as a man. Kean has been created out of society's need for illusion; his function, simply, is to please. In carrying out that function, Kean has become an appearance of a reality. For himself he is only make-believe. Since the subjective sense of his reality eludes him, he must depend on the image he finds in the eyes of others. Both for himself and for others, he emerges as a reflection. Sartre describes Kean in the same terms as he earlier described Genet: "It was you who took an infant and turned him into a monster". (p. 102)

Kean, the drama of the actor, is a comic encapsulation of a theme present throughout Sartre's plays: the difference between gesture and act. Orestes, Goetz, Hugo, and Valéra, like Kean, all act for an audience, performing the role of an imaginary character. Their first concern is not to do, but to be seen, and they use a real or imagined audience as a means of acceding to the identity of hero. (p. 107)

Sartre allows himself the luxury of being comic in Kean because the play is not intended to be engagé in the same sense that The Respectful Prostitute and Nekrassov clearly are. In his two "serious" comedies Sartre is ultimately less concerned about comic coherence than about the clarity of his social message. But the world of the actor Kean—so like that of the actor-child of The Words—is one where politics "is not our line." (p. 109)

The most common accusation leveled against Sartre's novels and plays has been that they are too "philosophical," more concerned with ideas than with individuals. In this light, it is perhaps paradoxical that those two literary works generally considered Sartre's masterpieces [Nausea and No Exit] happen also to be those that proceed most directly from one of his major philosophical works, Being and Nothingness…. Sartre devotes large segments of Being and Nothingness to a close analysis of what is revealed dramatically in No Exit. The section "Concrete Relations With Others' and, even more centrally, the chapter "The Look" serve as an ontological explanation of the play.

Yet No Exit is not a thesis play in the conventional sense, any more than Nausea is a conventional thesis novel. What makes No Exit a masterpiece is that Sartre is able to translate philosophy into dramatic form. No Exit—in contrast to Sartre's other plays—does not contain a lot of ideas; it is, in itself, a powerful literary idea…. Garcin, Estelle, and Inez are not independently interesting characters endowed, as the expression goes, with "a life of their own." What gives them interest is that they are incarcerated together. And it is their existence together, for eternity, that creates Sartre's idea and maintains it in dramatic action. (pp. 110-11)

Nausea is an individual confrontation with the world lived to such intensity as to be an obsession. Sartre's other fundamental obsession—his other philosophical myth—is expressed in its purest form in No Exit: the self petrified into an object by the Medusa-like look of other people.

For Sartre, "My original fall is the existence of the Other." The existence of the other is directly revealed to me by his look. The look that sees me endows me with an identity, a nature…. Sartre connects the fall … not with any particular sin but with my discovery in shame of a symbolic state of nakedness, of my defenseless state as an object in the eyes of the other. I experience his gaze as a form of possession and even of theft; he has me as I can never have myself. This fundamental alienation explains the lure of the mirror, which gives me the illusion of seeing myself as the other sees me, of becoming the other looking at me while still remaining myself. But in spite of my efforts, "The Other holds a secret—the secret of what I am." The self that I am for the other is in no way commensurate with my own experience of myself. My behavior has a particular meaning for me; seen by another it is defined, captured as by a photograph, given another meaning over which I have no control. (pp. 111-12)

The look becomes Hell when the other refuses the image of myself I want him to see. In No Exit this happens to each character in turn as he finds himself the one who looks and the one who is looked at, the torturer and the victim. As the play circles downward and inward to its conclusion, the three realize in horror their complete interdependence. (pp. 113-14)

Iris Murdoch reminds us that "Sartre, like Freud, finds in the abnormal the exaggerated forms of normality." Sartre's characters in No Exit express attitudes that are common enough in their basic form; Sartre takes those attitudes to their extreme possible consequences.

[We] see why Garcin, Inez, and Estelle have been damned in Hell. Even before their deaths, they were never completely alive. All three treated others as their possessions, objects to be used. Their punishment is appropriate to their sin. They existed through domination and sadism, taking pleasure in the suffering of their victims. Each one finds now that he himself is a victim, tortured unmercifully by his dependence on the others….

It is because they are dead that Inez's retort to Garcin's last attempt to defend himself is a statement of horror: "You are—your life, and nothing else." For someone on the threshold of life, those same words could be exhilarating. For Garcin, Estelle, and Inez, they are a final damnation…. If existence precedes essence, they have become their essence…. For all three of them, that essence is a form of failure. (pp. 121-22)

"Hell is—other people" is the central truth of No Exit. Within the play, it serves as a summing up of what has been dramatically revealed to us by the interaction of its three characters. It is important to remember, however, that within Sartre's philosophy that formula has a limited and specific meaning. Sartre has emphasized this point: "The only valid relationship is with other people. That can go even to hell. In order for it not to be hell, praxis must exist. The characters of No Exit are in a passive, changeless situation in which each of them is inevitably fixed in his essence by the others." Hell, then, is other people when they brand us with an image we cannot bear to accept as our own, and when we have no possibility to act so as to change that image. (p. 124)

In his "Forgers of Myth" speech, given in the United States in 1946, Sartre described as follows the new French plays born during the Occupation:

Our plays are violent and brief, centered around one single event; there are few players and the story is compressed within a short space of time, sometimes only a few hours. As a result they obey a kind of "rule of the three unities," which has been only a little rejuvenated and modified. A single set, a few entrances, a few exits, intense arguments among the characters who defend their individual rights with passion.

No Exit entirely fits that characterization; it is the only one of Sartre's plays to do so. It is also the only Sartrean play to contend successfully with the problem of dramatic language, which Sartre has recognized as the fundamental problem of theatre…. In No Exit Sartre creates a language bare of extraneous rhetoric: the words act. Language can even be considered one of the themes of No Exit. (p. 125)

The terrible interdependence of man and his human prey, fixed by eternity in No Exit, dramatized in individual nonmythical terms in Dirty Hands, becomes in The Condemned of Altona the tragedy of history.

Most of Sartre's plays are concerned with man and history. The Condemned, however, is the first play in which man's struggle with history takes place in the claustrophobic world of Sartre's best early works. In Franz's room, enclosed behind the bolted door, history assumes a life and a tragic reality that is singularly absent from the open spaces of The Flies and The Devil and the Good Lord. (p. 150)

In contrast to so many of Sartre's heroes who are reduced to schematic formulas, Franz, in the best moments of the play, puts us in touch with that "infracassable noyau de nuit" [indestructible kernel of darkness] at the point where our individual and collective history meet. (p. 151)

It is worth noting that the much talked about "existentialist hero," considered a "positive" figure, does not appear at all in Sartre's novels or stories; he appears only in The Flies and The Devil and the Good Lord. Orestes and Goetz belong to no collectivity. Their past has left them only with a sense of what they are not. Engagement expressed in violence thus becomes their means of acceding to reality. In Sartre's heroic mythology, violence for a liberating cause is both a ritual of initiation into the human community and the exact price of his hero's salvation. (p. 152)

[It] is Sartre's No Exit, one of the two plays he might call a purely critical spectacle, that is also his most perfect: the only play in which Sartre fully realizes what he sets out to do. (pp. 152-53)

In his What Is Literature?, written in 1947, Sartre contrasts the prose writer with the poet or painter. He defines prose as essentially utilitarian, using words as signs that point to a particular meaning. The poet, on the other hand, like the artist with his paint, creates an object with words; as such it is opaque and self-contained. The context of Sartre's definitions implies a faith that prose literature can act in the real world.

This utilitarian conception of prose bears directly on Sartre's sense of literature as salvation. The connection lies in his position that "the 'engaged' writer knows that words are action. He knows that to reveal is to change and that one can reveal only by planning to change." In this definition Sartre does not distinguish between action and the image of action, or, as he so frequently puts it, between act and gesture. A magical leap has been made from the word to the world. (p. 157)

His central problem in the plays is one of language: his demand that words become action conflicts with their power as words.

No Exit is the only Sartrean play that triumphs completely over this problem. Its structure has [a] kind of mathematical purity…. The entire action is in the interaction of the three characters as they create their hell. Once the infernal machine is set in motion, it functions with its own automatic necessity. Nothing external intervenes to alter the initial situation; we simply watch the inevitable take place in a single dramatic movement that repeats itself again and again, each time with greater intensity until the final prise de conscience which is the play's climax.

The Condemned of Altona does not achieve the integration of form and content that gives No Exit its peculiarly classical beauty. The achievement of The Condemned is Franz. Earlier, in Dirty Hands, Sartre created in Hugo a character perhaps equally complex; as with Franz, we are given an intimate awareness of his public and private truths. Hugo, however, lacks the stature to embody those issues that the play requires him to embody. Dirty Hands nevertheless succeeds as effective drama because of the vitality of its central relationships. In The Condemned, a more ambitious and original effort than Dirty Hands, Sartre creates with Franz a character both fascinating in himself and large enough to support the themes with which the play contends. The scenes of Franz's madness, his attempts to find the words that will proclaim him innocent to the tribunal of crabs, are equal to the best in Sartre's writing.

Like No Exit and The Condemned Sartre's satiric comedies dramatize a negative image. The Respectful Prostitute and Nekrassov miss their mark, however, to the extent that Sartre distrusts the critical function of comedy. At crucial moments, he abandons his chosen weapon…. Rather than allowing his characters to speak as themselves, Sartre the political moralist, fearful of not being clear, periodically intrudes to explain what he really means.

Sartre often speaks of literature as an act of "disclosure," but the majority of his plays reach impatiently for a more concrete kind of action. In so doing, they rarely by indirections find directions out; instead, they rely on straightforward, didactic prose…. Sartre has always been fascinated by the absolute of literature and, at the same time, distrustful of its attraction. As a choice of the imaginary over the real, literature becomes suspect, since it is the real world that Sartre wants to change. (pp. 157-60)

Sartre sees the impasse of literature in general in its inability, at this point in history, to speak to all. His sense that literature must be concretely universal is particularly frustrated by the theatre as it exists institutionally. (p. 160)

[While] Sartre has complained of theatre as a bourgeois institution, his own plays do not attempt to change the old forms. The subject of all Sartrean plays is subversive; their end is to undermine the established system of values. Sartre sees the writer as a mediator who gives society a "bad conscience" by creating an awareness that contests its basic assumptions. But he presents this subversive content within a conventional form. Sartre has expressed great admiration for the dramas of Brecht, Genet, and Beckett; in his own plays, however, he has chosen to use traditional dramatic techniques rather than experiment with new ones. This traditionalism has often proved inadequate to sustain what he wants to say. (pp. 160-61)

For Sartre the idea of literature as an absolute is intimately connected with a faith in salvation. His most recent position, expressed in The Words, indicates that his loss of faith in one has meant loss of faith in both:

For a long time, I took my pen for a sword; I now know we're powerless. No matter. I write and will keep writing books; they're needed; all the same, they do serve some purpose. Culture doesn't save anything or anyone, it doesn't justify. But it's a product of man: he projects himself into it, he recognizes himself in it; that critical mirror alone offers him his image.

                                        (pp. 161-62)

Sartre has constantly vacillated between the conviction that literature is everything and that literature is nothing, between the desire to capture in words a total reality and the frustration that that reality can be captured only in the imaginary. His autobiography relates his present disillusionment with literature; the words embody a power denied by their contents. (pp. 162-63)

Dorothy McCall, in her The Theatre of Jean-Paul Sartre (copyright © 1967, 1969 Columbia University Press; reprinted by permission of the publisher), Columbia University Press, 1969.