[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 nevertheless makes a similar point in Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Grove Press, 1962):

Now, although this is the short-story which (with La Nausée) made Sartre's name in France before the War, it is, in its general outline, the least characteristic of his works. The neat plot with the "ironical twist" at the end belongs to a tradition of fiction which Sartre specifically repudiates. Maupassant might have invented such a plot. It is a technique which is cultivated by what Sartre calls the bourgeois "literature of consumption."

There are three possible explanations for "The Wall"'s trick ending. 1. It is a mistake, an error, a moment of residual bourgeois excess in a relatively young Sartre. 2. It is symptomatic of a defect in Sartrean existentialism. 3. It is result of the marriage of the theoretical presuppositions of existentialism with the rules of narrative prose.

Somers would probably argue a version of #2. Cranston's sympathetically condescending reading of the story is clearly subsumable under #1. In fact, most critics of Sartre have interpreted "The Wall"'s ending as either weakness or error. This essay proposes to suggest a third possibility, that is, #3. Specifically, I will claim that the ending of "The Wall" is necessary given two conflicting demands. A cliché of existentialist criticism is that for Sartre (and, a fortiori, for Camus) pure theory lacks the emotional directness and persuasive power of literature. Consequently, in order for the principles of existentialism to be presented in the most authentic manner possible, they need to be embodied in the form of literature. This imperative, although seemingly unproblematic, is in fact the locus of a crucial contradiction. As I will explain shortly, the internal logic of existentialism and the internal logic of literary prose are in fact incompatible. The "trick" ending of "The Wall" is the expression of this impasse.

It is not within the scope of this essay to give a comprehensive definition of existentialism. Suffice it to say that for Sartre, the only existentialist who willingly accepted and affirmed the label, existentialism is a philosophy which stresses man's freedom. The fundamental axiom of Sartrean existentialism is that meanings, values, identities etc. are produced by man (or more properly the For-itself, or Human-reality) who is, as a consequence, free to create his own umwelt. A corollary to this principle is that given his freedom in the domain of meaning (the meaning of the world, as opposed to the physics of the world which Sartre calls facticity and which he believes to be beyond man's compass to effect in any significant way), man is rendered solely responsible for the world he creates. All this is relatively obvious and widely accepted. For the purposes of my analysis, I would like to focus on one aspect of existentialist theory. For Sartre, man's cosmogenic activity is always to be understood as malleable and contingent. Since man is himself unessential and accidental (de trop), his projects are open-ended. To the extent that man is free, that is, given the past does not impinge on him to such a degree that it constrains his freedom to choose his being, no state in which man finds himself or to whose creation he contributes can be theorized as permanent or necessary. If man's being is freedom, then his future cannot be predicted from either his past or from any kind of law (psychological, sociological, economic etc.).

This view of man's freedom is the central theme of "The Wall." Specifically, the short story attempts to investigate the dilemma of reconciling freedom with mortality. The story's three central characters, among whom is the protagonist, Pablo Ibbieta, are condemned to death by the fascists during the Spanish Civil War. The bulk of story deals with Pablo's attempts to understand how the supposed certainty of his execution will affect both what is left of his life and his perception of his past. Briefly, Pablo realizes that in the past he had lived as if he were immortal. Now, certain of his impending execution, he is overwhelmed by his morality:

My life was in front of me, shut, closed like a bag and yet everything inside of it was unfinished. For an instant I tried to pass judgment on it; it was only a sketch; I had spent my time counterfeiting eternity, I had understood nothing.

No longer able to pretend that he is immortal, yet, like Tom, incapable of understanding what will happen after he is propped against the wall and shot ("It made no sense. I only found words or emptiness."), Pablo would like to make sense of his life. Unlike Garcin in No Exit, who tries to change his past by retroactively interpreting it in a favorable light, Pablo is not yet dead. Consequently, his life is still open, essentially a project. Yet it is not indefinite. He knows he will be dead in a few hours. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre argues that although one's death is in principle non-experiencable and consequently not something that can be anticipated, an exception is possible in a number of special cases, among them that of one condemned to death: "Furthermore, death can not be awaited unless it is very precisely designated as my condemnation to death." The dilemma Pablo faces is as follows: his life is unfinished because life is by definition a series of future choices; yet at a given moment, in the middle its flux, it will be terminated. That which can have no end will end.

On the level of existentialist theory Pablo's aporia is easily resolved. Sartre makes a sharp distinction between termination and closure. Man's life is an untethered futural projection until, at a certain moment, it is disrupted in the midst of its freedom. Since death is not completion, it offers no solace for one who is looking for the intellectual and ethical comfort of an absolute touchstone. Death may make man's existence more poignant, it might highlight its difference from the existence of a rock, but it in no way offers the comfort of resolution. Therefore, we could argue that Pablo's apparent lack of interest in life towards the end of the story (I say "apparent" because, despite his indifference, he nevertheless does lie about Gris' whereabouts in the attempt to foil the fascist's plans to apprehend him.) would be an example of Sartrean bad faith. Ibbieta lives as if he were already dead, which is to say he abdicates the little bit of freedom left him.

Having ventured this far into existentialist theory, we are ready to turn to narrative theory. Given the distinction just established between the notions of ending and closure, why does Sartre resort to the seemingly theatrical finale of the short story? Two features of "The Wall"'s narrative organization need to be investigated. One is a choice on Sartre's part, the other an inevitable and inescapable characteristic of all narratives. First, we will examine the narrative voice which structures "The Wall." Then, we will examine the consequences of the requirement that all narratives end.

"The Wall," like a number of other prose works by Sartre, is written in the first person. At first glance, this is an excellent choice of narrative voice for one with an existentialist agenda. Roland Barthes, in Writing Degree Zero [A Barthes Reader, 1983] argues that the first person has two defining characteristics. One, "the 'I' is usually a spectator." Second, as opposed to the transparency of the third person, the "I " connotes opacity, particularity, contingency: "the profound darkness of the existentialist T. " Both of these qualities make the first person into a perfect vehicle for an author whose main interest is to communicate in a concrete way the existential choices of a character with whom the reader is clearly meant to identify. It is no accident, then, that Ibbieta, like Roquentin in Nausea, speaks in the "I. " What Sartre sacrifices in control and precision he makes up for in immediacy and the authenticity of a limited perspective.

The second characteristic of "The Wall"'s narrative structure is one it shares with all literature. Narratives, as opposed to one's awareness of the constitution and dissolution of consciousness, imply the possibility of experiencing their first and last moment. Although there are a number of strategems to palliate this necessity (one of which, the creation of a self-reference loop, I will discuss presently), it is inevitable that a narrative exhaust itself. The reader, who, according to Sartre, is in principle unable to experience his own birth or death, is the necessary witness to the narrative's beginning and end. If fiction is to have a mimetic function, as Sartre clearly thought it does, then its finitude is an essential moment of opacity, a cruel disjunction between fiction and life.

This dilemma, the inability to reconcile boundless experience with a limited work of fiction, is also a central concern in Nausea. As is "The Wall," Nausea is beset with the problem of its own conclusion. Sartre's strategy in Nausea is to have the novel end with the ambiguous possibility of salvation through a book that Roquentin will write. As many critics have noted, it is inviting to hypothesize that this novel within a novel is Nausea itself, in which case the novel would have created a closed, infinitely regressive structure of self-representation, thereby diluting the effects of closure. As I will argue shortly, the ending of "The Wall" is in fact a version of this internal mirror. The difference between "The Wall" and Nausea is that because "The Wall" contains a plot feature absent from Nausea, the closure problem is exacerbated in the former and demands a different kind of resolution.

The challenge besetting "The Wall" is to reconcile a first person narrative with a plot in which the character who says "I " is condemned to death. This is not a minor problem peculiar to merely "The Wall." In fact, the dilemma I am describing recapitulates in a highly condensed manner a crucial difficulty troubling any attempt to incarnate the theory of existentialism in narrative form.

Clearly, given a first person narrative, Pablo Ibbieta cannot be executed. Of course there are ways to finesse this difficulty. The story could end before his execution, a tack chosen by Camus in The Stranger. Such a solution would clearly not serve Sartre's purposes, since a conclusion during the penultimate moment would still leave Pablo's ultimate fate undecided. Another solution would involve a switch in narrative voice at the end, something like what Sartre does in "Intimacy." That also would not do, since in "Intimacy" the alternation between narrative voices is an integral feature of the story, whereas such a switch at the end of "The Wall" would appear no less makeshift than its actual conclusion. Therefore, the moment Sartre conceived of a plot in which a first person narrator awaits his execution, he in fact created an impossible work of fiction. In its form, it is reminiscent of the Epimenides paradox ("This statement is false."). If it is to be authentic, it must end with the execution of the protagonist; however, if Ibbieta is executed the story cannot be completed, consequently it cannot be written. We can imagine a version of an Epimenides sentence that goes like this: "In order for this sentence to be authentic, its author must have been executed before he finished it."

It is not difficult to generalize this paradox so that it encompasses the general relation between existentialist theory and fiction. In other words, the internal structure of "The Wall," the self-negation of its project, is in fact a microcosmic version of the impossible reconciliation between a theory of experience which posits an essentially open future with a form of expression which is finite. In fact, much of Sartre's literary work can be seen to grapple with this issue. From the projected novel at the end of Nausea to the "Well, well, let's get on with it. . . ." closing No Exit, Sartre repeatedly attempts to create a kind of fiction that is indefinite. It goes without saying that, notwithstanding such strategies as suspended endings, deferred endings, and, at the highest levels of sophistication, self-referential loops, the project is doomed to failure. It is in the nature of fiction to be repeated. This not a contingent state of affairs; the very essence of literature is that it be available for repeated performances, consequently it must be framed in such a way as to insure that it begins (that is, that the audience's awareness switches from a normal experience mode to an aesthetic mode) and ends (the audience's frame of mind switches back). However, for an entity to be repeatable, it must have concrete limits. In other words, it is logically impossible to repeat something which has not been delimited: iterability implies finitude. This basic principle yields a consequence that is of paramount importance for our analysis. It appears that the fictive mode is in basic contradiction with the existentialist project. In fact, fiction could be construed as an instance of the For-itself indulging in bad faith.

Given such a state of affairs, we are in a position to reevaluate "The Wall." If, as I have argued, the structure of "The Wall" makes a reasonable ending impossible, and if, furthermore, this impossibility is understood as a version of the larger issue of the incompatibility of existentialist theory with the internal laws of fiction, then we are in a position to offer an interpretation of the story's conclusion. It will be recalled that the dilemma facing the narrator in "The Wall" is that, although he is condemned to death, he cannot be executed. In other words, the reader of "The Wall" is deprived of an authentic identification with Pablo because, even though Pablo believes he will be shot the morning following the night during which most of the plot of "The Wall" transpires, the reader understands that, insofar as he sees the world through Pablo's eyes, there is an unbreachable disparity between what he knows and what Pablo thinks he knows. One is reminded of a similar situation common to ancient Greek drama in which the audience, being aware of the legendary plot, constantly attributes double meanings to the protagonist's proclamations (in Oedipus The King, for example, the audience is acutely aware that the murderer of Laius and Oedipus are the same person). Sartre's solution to this aporia is to have Pablo's petulant attempt to humiliate his interrogators by launching them on a wild goose chase backfire. What Somers calls a "sledge hammer . . . trick" and Cranston an "ironical twist" worthy of Maupassant is, I would argue, a moment of stark lucidity on the part of Sartre. When it turns out that Juan Gris is actually in the cemetery where Pablo sends the fascists, he is, naturally, nonplussed: "Everything began to spin and I found myself sitting on the ground: I laughed so hard I cried." Pablo's laughter could be interpreted as his realization that life is fundamentally unpredictable, hence absurd, or his sudden understanding that his previous abdication of freedom had been irresponsible, given the whimsical nature of human events. Although I think these are possible explanations of the story's ending, I think another, perhaps more obvious interpretation, is actually more compelling. I would like to suggest that the kinds of readings engaged in by Somers and Cranston are in fact correct except in one crucial aspect. The ending of "The Wall" is indeed theatrical, bourgeois, cheap etc. What if, however, the ending's very artificiality, its very fictiveness, were its strength, perhaps its central point?

I am not arguing that Sartre was or was not aware of what he was doing. As far as I know, there is no evidence one way or the other, and I think that the retroactive assignment of authorial motives without concrete evidence is one of criticism's worse habits. I am merely suggesting that the ending of "The Wall" can be read as an instance of trenchant self-reflexion, a superb moment of auto-representation. For if there is no Ariadne to lead Pablo (or the reader) out of his labyrinth, what better solution than to acknowledge, in a tacit but powerful way, that the labyrinth is nothing other than "The Wall" itself? In other words, the story's seemingly forced ending can be read in an affirmative manner by seeing it as a gesture of submission to the laws of fiction. By pointing to its own artificiality, that is, by containing within itself a miniature version of itself which differs from the entire story only in that it asserts its limitations as fiction, "The Wall," which is usually read as a good story with a weak ending, can now be interpreted as a powerful ending salvaging an impossible story.

The consequences of such an interpretation of "The Wall" are of two basic kinds. On one level, and certainly not an insignificant one, it is now possible to salvage "The Wall" from its critical dust bin. Instead of seeing it as "the least characteristic" of Sartre's works, we may now situate it in a series of attempts to experiment with the notion of fictive closure. As such, "The Wall," because it is the most daring of these efforts, may be the most intriguing. On a second, broader level, "The Wall" can be seen as figuring the general dilemma generated by any attempt to incarnate existentialist theory in fiction. Specifically, the reading of "The Wall" that I am proposing postulates its ending as its theme. Rather than conceptualizing the plot twist that saves Pablo's life at the end of "The Wall" as flaw, I am suggesting that it's theatricality, its unabashed fictiveness, is its strength. It's as if "The Wall" were telling the reader that the unlimited futural projection posited by Sartre as the essence of Human-reality's freedom is inimical to fiction. Furthermore, if, as opposed to Kant, we hypothesize that the aesthetic drive in humans is not an isolated phenomenon, then "The Wall" compells us to ask why the organism which, according to Sartre, creates its most genuine existence when it refrains from repetition and fixity is the same organism which creates art, a mode of experience that is by definition framed, that is, immured within its own limits?

Additional coverage of Sartre's life and career is contained in the following sources published by The Gale Group: Contemporary Authors, Vols. 9-12R, 97-100; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vol. 21; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 1, 4, 7, 9, 13, 18, 24, 44, 50, 52; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 72; Discovering Authors; Discovering Authors: British; Discovering Authors: Canadian; Discovering Authors: Dramatists Module; Discovering Authors: Most-Studied Authors Module; Discovering Authors: Novelists Module; Drama Criticism, Vol. 3; Major 20th-century Writers; and World Literature Criticism.