A philosopher described Sartre's philosophy as one "rooted in experience and directed towards the analysis of experience," of experiences which are "paradigm cases" for him. But there are, beyond these, individual phenomena which are irreducible to philosophy as a coherent body of thought. Sartre therefore relies on literature to complement philosophy and on literary criticism to mediate between literature and philosophy.

Sartre found or founded in literature vertigo and anguish as the experience of man's freedom; man's gaze as the revelation of the other, interiorized in shame when dominated, in pride when dominating; the privileged moments of a choice of being or of a profound change in direction as "paradigm cases" of the project and praxis, either authentic in a spirit of contestation or in bad faith in the "spirit of seriousness." Literature is also the medium in which description of the act of living discloses knowledge. Sometimes a literary "becoming" has the weight of a comprehensive philosophical or theological demonstration. [In Nausea,] Roquentin feels that life acquires a greater density of being when he hears the voice of commitment. In short, in literature an imaginary prereflective and reflective experience precedes philosophy, just as existence precedes essence. And since Sartre—by his reliance on literature—has been able to produce a systematic existentialist philosophy, this constitutes, in turn, a validation of literature. (p. 267)

Sartre's evolution shows a remarkable degree of consistency; it is the story of an unfolding, not of changes in direction. His career as a literary critic follows by a few years the publication of his phenomenological monographs. In the latter, he expelled interiority from consciousness and established the distinction between perception and imagination. He was one of the early enthusiastic readers of Dos Passos because that author dispensed with inner life, and, in turn, his discovery of Faulkner's "disloyal" temporality foreshadowed the development of his own ontological temporality in Being and Nothingness. In his other early reviews Sartre treats of Giraudoux's latent Aristotelianism, Ponge's psychoanalysis of things, Mauriac's a priori essentialism, Camus's concept of absurdity from the point of view of reason, and the problem of language as that of the recuperation of being. In the style of a work, its structure, its temporality, its semantic field, its tone or its rhythm, Sartre seeks to detect the metaphysics of an author and judges it according to his own. For from the outset Sartre used literary criticism as a mediation between his philosophy and literature.

He expanded his thought in his phenomenological ontology, which permitted him to define man's project as a variant of value and aesthetic beauty as value. Commitment, arising from contingency and facticity, brought him to the need and the promise of a normative ethics. So far, modifying Freud through his existentialist psychoanalysis, Sartre had described the in-authenticity of the spirit of seriousness and asked only that one recognize one's contingency.

With the first issue of Les Temps Modernes Sartre, aroused by the war and the Resistance movement, manifested his involvement with social issues. Its "Présentation" announced as its aim the foundation of a synthetic anthropology. Later issues featured What is Literature? with its definition of aesthetic pleasure and of committed literature, and a series of articles on literary criticism in character with his existentialist ontology and his new concern for history.

With the Baudelaire and the Saint Genet Sartre created what is actually a new genre: existentialist biography. Following the elaboration of an existentialist anthropology in the [Critique of Dialectical Reason (Critique de la raison dialectique)], Sartre could expand and perfect his biographical criticism in the Flaubert articles. It remained the history of an author's consciousness, but it now gave greater weight to his family and social conditioning as a child. Sartre fully developed his regressive-progressive and analytico-synthetic method of research: a man's life is the endeavor to unify his world in a totalizing praxis in which he develops his initial project. (pp. 268-69)

The role of literary criticism as a dynamic correlation between literature and philosophy is in many respects originally and peculiarly Sartrian. Sartre did not, in spite of his tabula rasa point of departure in philosophy, discard any of the criteria of literary criticism to be derived from the humanistic disciplines, but he centered them on his own philosophical system. In this critical reflection on an author's work as the expression of his total existence, Sartre penetrates to the underlying metaphysics. Sartre can be a rewarding reader, ready to recognize and adopt valid discoveries in a literary work or to criticize them from the point of view of his existentialist criteria…. Sartre's literary criticism is a guide, a method of research, but not an a priori system to be imposed on original thought. To him, literary criticism is in a permanent evolution, moving back and forth from philosophy to the lived world of the author, so as to renew, to complement, to enlarge, to deepen and to explicate one by the other.

Sartre's philosophy and literary criticism exist as the antidote to most Anglo-American philosophy, preoccupied, in the words of one critic, "with the analysis of language and with problems in the theory of knowledge," philosophers to whom "philosophy [is] a dialogue between philosophers, unbroken by reference to anything outside philosophy." One might perhaps say that nonexistentialist philosophy as a whole is more dominated by the tradition of its own past than is literature, thanks to its "belletristic" freedom. Taking reflection on experience as its point of departure, Sartrian literary criticism is a free and unending dialogue between the two disciplines in which he seeks a unification of many branches of knowledge, and to which he brings the criteria developed in his philosophy.

Success in one's critical endeavor is reached, by his own standards, when one has the intuition of having attained irreducibility and thus advanced to an understanding of a work and an author that explicates the greatest number of phenomena. This is exactly what Sartre has achieved: he has "reduced" traditional categories in many fields while integrating them into his concept of the original choice of being. (pp. 269-71)

Sartre's first impetus to write came from a passion to understand what he was to others. In the process he often had to think against himself, and, in tried and true phenomenological fashion, he came, as has no one before him, to understand those of whom he himself was conscious: the others. In either case, in the words of a perceptive reader of Sartre, "we can no longer formulate a general truth about ourselves which shall encompass us like a house." The most we can do is to emulate Sartre's lack of illusions, his lucidity, his wager of commitment, and his example of someone who "by inventing his own issue, invents himself." (p. 272)