SOURCE: "Lying to the Murderer: Sartre's Use of Kant in 'The Wall'," in Mosaic, Vol. XVIII, No. 2, Spring, 1985, pp. 1-16.

[In the essay below, Sweeney examines the psychological condition of all three men sentenced to execution in "The Wall" in an effort to comprehend Sartre's philosophical argument that "there are moral boundaries to human existence" and "one of these limits is the responsibility for one's actions."]

Despite the lingering "old quarrel between philosophy and poetry" over the suitability of presenting a philosophical investigation in literary form (Plato's Republic 607 B), philosophers regularly use literary genres to present their ideas. Jean-Paul Sartre's short story "The Wall" is an example of such a philosophical project. In the story Sartre offers a counter-example to one of Husserl's views and an illustration supporting his own alternative position. Sartre's particular project is easy to overlook given the vivid, extended descriptions of the central characters' terrified reactions to the prospect of their execution. Critics routinely interpret the story as a phenomenological account of the emotional state of terror in the face of death. They refer to "The Wall" as a story whose "real subject is fear" [in "Sources and Psychology of Sartre's 'Le Mur'," Criticism, Vol. 7, 1965, p. 48], and as a "classic treatment of the central existentialist motif of confrontation with death" which closes with an "O. Henry" ending [Walter Kaufmann, ed. in Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre, New York, 1975]. As I will argue, however, "The Wall" needs to be seen as a developed, philosophical argument.

The philosophical character of the story stands out more clearly if close attention is paid to the integrity of the work's four-part structure. In the first section Sartre sets out the central ethical issue; the second section contrasts the protagonist's actions with those of his two companions; the third shows the predicament that results from those actions; finally, the fourth section reveals the consequences of the protagonist's choice and draws a conclusion. If one were to concentrate primarily on the anguished behavior of the main characters, the integrity of the structure might go unobserved. The ending would most likely be seen as a literary device for reducing the tension built up by the prisoners' terror in the middle sections, rather than a resolution of the themes of commitment and psychological escape on which Sartre bases his criticism of Husserl.

The integrity of the story's structure and the story's identity as a philosophical enterprise are more clearly visible if one realizes that Sartre has used some examples from Kant's essay, "On A Supposed Right To Lie From Altruistic Motives." Seen in the context of Kant's examples, instances of lying in "The Wall"—both to others (the theme of commitment) and to self (psychological escape and self-deception)—are foregrounded and show the development of Sartre's thesis.

Kant's essay is a reply to an attack by Benjamin Constant on his position that one has a duty always to tell the truth. In criticizing Kant's position, Constant poses the following situation of moral choice. (Situations of this general sort I will refer to as "Constant situations.") You are entertaining a friend in your home. A murderer intent on killing this friend comes to the door and asks you whether or not the friend is there, threatening to kill him. On the assumption that the murderer forces you either to lie or tell the truth, what ought you to do? Constant argues that anyone in such a position has the right to lie to the murderer. The murderer has no right to the truth; hence, one has no duty to reveal where the friend is. Constant chides Kant that his prohibition against lying would require one to tell the murderer the truth, a consequence of the position Constant finds ethically outrageous.

In the opening section of "The Wall" Sartre introduces this same general form of moral predicament—a Constant situation. Set during the Spanish Civil War, the story opens with Pablo Ibbieta, the protagonist and narrator, and two other men (young Juan Mirbal and Tom Steinbock, a volunteer in the International Brigade) being brought before a Falangist military tribunal. They face charges of complicity with the Republican side, an offense punishable by death. The last of the three to face the four-man court, Pablo is asked:

"Where's Ramon Gris?"

"I don't know."

"You hid him in your house from the 6th to the 19th."

"No."

Ramon Gris is Pablo's friend and, as Pablo later admits, an asset to the Republican cause. Although he denies knowing where Gris is, Pablo is lying. Later, in the third section, he reveals: "Of course I knew where Gris was; he was hiding with his cousins four kilometers from the city." Pablo lies to the court from an altruistic motive. Knowing that the Falangists want Gris's life, he lies to protect his friend and political ally.

It is not apparent to the reader at this point of the story that Pablo is lying. The narrator says neither whether Pablo is lying or telling the truth; nor does he indicate what Pablo's motives are in answering the questions. This lack of narratorial context is augmented by the judges who neither challenge nor react to what Pablo tells them.

The ambiguity of Pablo's exchange is contrasted with Tom's straightforward trial. The International Brigade volunteer faces the court fully aware that the judges know both who he is and what his role in the fighting has been. "They asked Tom," Pablo relates, "if it were true he was in the International Brigade; Tom couldn't tell them otherwise because of the papers they found in his coat." As the narrator implies, Tom is in no position to bluff his way free. He tells the truth, knowing that the court has found his identity papers. This narrator-supplied confirmation of veracity is lacking in Pablo's case.

Juan's situation is different from that of Tom's truthful reply and Pablo's prevarication. Juan believes that his being brought before the tribunal is a mistake. He believes that the soldiers have confused him with his brother José. "My brother José is the anarchist," he pleads, "you know he isn't here any more. I don't belong to any party. I never had anything to do with politics. . . . I haven't done anything. I don't want to pay for someone else." All he needs do, he believes, is to tell the soldiers of their mistake. Unlike Pablo he is quite willing to inform on the person for whom he believes the soldiers are looking. Nevertheless, Juan's pleading is to no avail. The reader later learns that the Falangists have sentenced him to death even though as Tom says, they "don't have a thing against him."

Led to a cell, the three prisoners learn that they have been sentenced to be executed the next morning. This common sentence and the short and indifferent treatment by the tribunal tend to blur the differences among the three prisoners' behavior. In the second section the similar symptoms of terror exhibited by the men also create the impression of a certain uniformity. And it is this similarity which is responsible for the view that "The Wall" is concerned with the common physiological and psychological responses to a terrifying event. But the main concern of the story is not to dramatize terror. Rather, Sartre analyzses each character's moral choice in response to his predicament. He presents three different models of how individuals choose to confront an extreme situation.

Sartre offers a preview of these moral choices in the different ways that each of the men reacts to the court in the first section. In the next section each of the three men takes an attitude toward his death much like the one he adopts toward the court. Tom eventually confronts the fact of his approaching death, just as he recognized that he could not bluff his way out of the tribunal's charge; Juan, believing that the court has mistaken him for his brother, continues to deny his fate; and Pablo pursues a strategy of deceiving himself just as he sought to deceive the tribunal. Tom is the model of acceptance; Juan of rejection; and Pablo, the curious combination of both acceptance and denial, is the model of self-deception. Of the three prisoners Pablo receives Sartre's major attention. The other two characters serve to put Pablo's situation in perspective, and after so doing, at the end of the second section, they are eliminated.

In the second section of "The Wall" the psychological condition of the prisoners is presented and developed so as to provide the necessary context for assessing their moral attitudes and choices. Sartre wishes to set out the psychological conditions under which Tom, Juan and Pablo act, as well as to show in what sense the prisoners' behavior is peculiarly moral. To see what philosophical values Sartre attaches to their respective actions and attitudes, it will be helpful to analyze the prisoners' behavior in terms of his contemporary philosophical works. In "The Transcendence of the Ego" (1936) and The Emotions (1939) Sartre not only develops his own theories on the emotions and consciousness, but also criticizes Husserl's position on transcendental subjectivity. These same topics appear in "The Wall."

Spending the night in the cell, a coal cellar of a former hospital, awaiting execution, all three men exhibit similar symptoms of terror, appearing "alike and worse than mirrors of each other." A Belgian doctor spends the night in their cell recording their "almost pathological state of terror." He notes their chills and tremblings, their facial distortions and grey coloring, the profuse sweating, the involuntary urinating, and the despondent lethargy alternating with violent reactions to slight irritations.

Although such emotional responses might seem to be merely involuntary reactions, Sartre in The Emotions urges a theory according to which such emotional behavior indicates the presence of a conscious, cognitive attitude. Sartre claims that an emotion is "a certain way of apprehending the world." Rather than being merely an affective state, an emotion is a form of consciousness, one frequently unreflective, whose purpose is to bring about a "transformation of the world." Sartre describes this transformational character of emotion in the following passage: "When the paths traced out become too difficult, or when we see no path, we can no longer live in so urgent and difficult a world. All the ways are barred. However, we must act. So we try to change the world, that is, to live as if the connection between things and their potentialities were not ruled by deterministic processes, but by magic. Let it be clearly understood that this is not a game; we are driven against a wall, and we throw ourselves into this new attitude with all the strength we can muster" [emphasis mine]. When a person is driven against a "wall," his fear is a magical attempt to alter the predicament confronting him. In emotional behavior, one consciously—although one may not reflectively be aware of so doing—acknowledges and transforms the relationship between consciousness and the threatening situation. One of Sartre's examples of such an emotion is the fear exhibited by someone who faints when charged by a ferocious beast. Certainly fainting is not an effective way of eluding the danger; yet it is, says Sartre, "a behavior of escape." With the magical act of fainting the person eliminates the dangerous beast "by eliminating consciousness." In summarizing his view, Sartre states, "the true meaning of fear is apparent: it is a consciousness which, through magical behavior, aims at denying an object of the external world, and which will go so far as to annihilate itself in order to annihilate the object with it."

Seen in the context of Sartre's theory of emotions, the prisoners' terror is indicative of a consciousness of their predicament. Yet, despite their similar display of terror, each prisoner adopts a different magical attitude toward his execution. Juan takes up a number of magical defensive postures. At first he moralizes about the injustice of his sentence and in so doing denies the prospect of its being carried out. Confronted with the death sentence, he exclaims: "That's not possible . . . I didn't do anything." He cannot be in mortal peril, he is convinced, since he refuses to accept that he is the one the soldiers want. Yet the "misunderstanding" continues, and gradually Juan becomes absorbed in self-pity. "I could see," says Pablo, "he was pitying himself; he wasn't thinking about death." The posture of self-pity alternates with "a terrible fear of suffering." By focusing on the pain, he avoids confronting the thought of his extinction. If the execution will be painful, at least one has to be alive to suffer from the bullets. Dreading the pain of the bullets is less terrifying than facing the thought of not existing at all.

In all of Juan's ways of magically dealing with death Pablo notices that he "made more noise than we did, but he was less touched: he was like a sick man who defends himself against his illness by fever. It's much more serious when there isn't any fever." Juan's final defense and "escape" is to collapse in terror on being taken from the cell to face the firing squad.

Unlike Juan who denies any political allegiance, Tom accepts responsibility for his role in the fighting, telling Pablo that he has "knocked off six [of the enemy] since the beginning of August." His first reaction to the prospect of dying is to talk, conversation being a way to avoid thinking about death. Pablo sees that "he didn't realize the situation and I could tell he didn't want to realize it." Yet his bodily reactions belie this tactic of avoidance. He then tries calisthenics and the comforting of Juan as ways to avoid the thought of dying. Ultimately, however, these ploys fail and the thought of his death becomes inescapable. Yet he makes a last effort to distance himself from the thought of dying. His death, he blurts out to Pablo, is incomprehensible: "Something is going to happen to us that I can't understand. . . . I see my corpse; that's not hard but I'm the one who sees it with my eyes. I've got to think . . . think that I won't see anything anymore and the world will go on for the others. We aren't made to think that, Pablo." Tom's implicit argument is that one cannot imagine oneself being dead since imagining oneself dead requires an inconsistent state of affairs: someone at the same time both actively imagining something and being the inanimate object of the imaginative activity. The argument, however, is specious. It takes a distorted view of the activity of imagining; it conflates the subject of the activity with the imaginary, mental object, and it runs together the present time of the act with the future time of the imagined event.

That Tom is using a specious argument to escape considering his imminent death is suggested by an event that occurs later that night. Pablo notices that Tom "had begun to stare at the bench with a sort of smile, he looked amazed. He put out his hand and touched the wood cautiously as if he were afraid of breaking something, then drew back his hand quickly and shuddered. . . . It was his death which Tom had just touched on the bench." This glimmering of awareness of his own mortal condition, this coming to terms with his own fate, places Tom in a sympathetic light. Of the three prisoners, he seems, from Sartre's point of view, to be the most authentic: struggling with his fear, accepting responsibility for his past, and confronting the prospect of his death as best he can.

Pablo, on the other hand, takes quite a different attitude toward his extinction. He sets himself the project of disassociating himself from all ties to his past (his memories, values, and attachments) in order, as he says, "to die cleanly." Yet despite this disassociation, Pablo still maintains some ties to his former way of life. At the time of his trial Pablo accepts his Anarchist past; he tenaciously guards the secret of Gris's hiding place. Unlike Juan, he accepts the connection between his sentence and his former life. His continuing to maintain the secret of Gris's whereabouts is evidence that he has not abandoned all his past allegiances. Thus with his decision to disassociate himself from all that has taken place there arises a bifurcation in his character: he both acknowledges his past and denies it.

The project of disassociation is brought on by his facing "the wall" of approaching death. As Sartre would have it, Pablo's project is an instance of magical behavior. In reminiscing about his past, he disparagingly notes his previous tendency to take "everything as seriously as if I were immortal. . . . I had spent my time counterfeiting eternity. I had understood nothing." He had lived, he muses, without fully realizing his mortal condition. His lack of understanding blinds him to his commitments and makes his former way of life seem futile. With his terror he has transformed the positive attachment he had felt toward his former way of life into one of nihilistic rejection. In his emotional state he has changed his relationship to himself and the world he lives in. One can see this in the attitude he takes toward Concha, the woman he loves. "Last night," he says to himself, "I would have given an arm to see her again for five minutes. . . . Now I had no more desire to see her, I had nothing to say to her." Disillusioned, he comments about his life: "'It's a damned lie.' It was worth nothing because it was finished. . . . death has disenchanted everything."

Pablo's calling his past life a "lie" is significant. He thinks that he has deceived himself by his past unsuspecting attitude toward his pleasures, projects and goals. His rejection of his past marks a split for him between what he sees as his former, deceptive life and a present, more honest, conscious self. That he might again be deceiving himself with his project of disengagement does not enter his mind.

Pablo's project of separating himself from his past is an emotional remedy for the anguish he feels in anticipating the firing squad. If he can face death free of his past, he will, he thinks, be free from the terror he feels so acutely. He says: "I clung to nothing, in a way I was calm." He is also motivated by his desire to be fully conscious of all his remaining moments of life, especially the moment of execution. By separating himself from his past attitudes and values, he will then be able to face the firing squad fully conscious, rather than unexpectedly suffering his death like a slaughtered animal. He does not want to be groggy with sleep and oblivious to what is happening to him: "I didn't want to die like an animal, I wanted to understand."

Pablo's desire for understanding is quite a different project from Tom's quest for understanding qua comprehension. For Pablo, to understand is to be aware and to realize the significance of all that takes place around him. His desire for understanding and for separation from his past express themselves in his taking an attitude similar in important respects to the Husserlian epoché. Although he has no philosophical motive behind his project, Pablo does believe that only if he adopts the attitude of a pure observing ego will he be able to witness what happens to him objectively. In taking such a stance he believes that he will no longer perceive his surroundings in his former, natural way, colored by his emotional associations, but will instead observe them with objectivity.

The resemblance between Pablo's disengaged understanding and the Husserlian project of epoché is intended to make a point similar to the one Sartre makes in "The Transcendence of the Ego." In that work, Sartre takes issue with Husserl's position that conscious experience requires the existence of a transcendental subject "behind" consciousness. Husserl's argument for transcendental subjectivity depends upon the phenomenological technique of epoché—the bracketing or setting aside of one's natural attitude toward the existence of things in the world so as to reduce the objects of one's experience to a presentation of phenomena. This reduction, according to Husserl, allows one to perceive the world objectively. Given this objective, reduced state of the world of experience, Husserl reasons that in order for consciousness to be able to perceive the various phenomena as unified objects, there must be a unifying agent in consciousness which makes possible one's perception of ordinary things in the world. This unifying agent Husserl identifies with a transcendental subject.

Sartre rejects both Husserl's derivation of a transcendental ego and the role epoché plays in the derivation. Rather than being transcendental (an active, conscious subject manipulating immediate experience into a world), the ego, Sartre holds, is only transcendent (an entity not identical with a particular phenomenon but known from a number of phenomena). The ego, Sartre says, "is the spontaneous transcendent unification of our states and our actions." In being transcendent the ego is like any other object in the world that has an existence independent of immediate experience. By holding there to be a transcendental ego, Husserl, according to Sartre, conflates consciousness with the subject of experience. His mistake is in identifying the conscious subject with an object having the power to unify experience. The transcendent character of the world, not any transcendental, conscious subject, ensures the unity of the things we experience.

Husserl employs the epoché in order to separate the subject of consciousness from the world of experience, thereby isolating the subject so as to show its transcendental nature. Repudiating Husserl's theory, Sartre holds that the ego exists in the world and cannot extricate itself. There are various ways of perceiving the world but none of them separates the self from the world, however much one might be convinced that such a separation is possible. Sartre says of Husserl's view of the ego: "Unfortunately, as long as the I remains a structure of absolute consciousness, one will still be able to reproach phenomenology for being an escapist doctrine, for again pulling a part of man out of the world and, in that way, turning our attention from the real problems." Husserl's account of epoché, Sartre holds, is actually an escapist theory.

Sartre claims that in his theory of epoché, Husserl has also misdescribed an extraordinary, but actual, project of consciousness. There is something like what Husserl labels an "epoché," but as a project bent on separating consciousness from the world of its predicament it is doomed to failure. Far from being "an intellectual method, an erudite procedure," Sartre views the project of epoché as induced by "an anxiety which is imposed on us and which we cannot avoid."

In "The Wall" Sartre puts forward an account of how such a project of disengagement might come about and the possible consequences of such a futile attempt to separate oneself from the world. In the guise of Pablo's project of "staying clean," Husserl's epoché is presented and reworked so that instead of being part of a philosophical method it is a magical project consciously undertaken in order to deal with a predicament.

Pablo's attempt at disengagement is made to seem credible by devices in the story that encourage the reader to distinguish Pablo in his role as protagonist from his role as narrator. Certain information that the narrator reports is information to which Pablo the prisoner does not have access. Tom, we are told, touches "his death" on the bench, yet he never tells Pablo about this experience. All that occurs in the story is presented from Pablo's point of view—but it is a variable point of view. At times, as in his observations about Tom and Juan, Pablo seems omniscient; at other times, especially when he reflects about himself, he is ignorant or fallible. For example, he says about himself: "Only I would have liked to understand the reasons for my conduct." Pablo's lack of self-knowledge alternating with his acute insight into others' characters tends to divide Pablo as narrator from Pablo the prisoner. That the tale should be told from the point of view of one whom—until the end of the story—the reader believes to be doomed, also encourages this division. Thus, Pablo's status as both narrator and condemned prisoner lends credence to his project of disengaging himself as conscious subject (a role compatible with being an omniscient observer) from his past identity (the role responsible for his being the condemned man).

His project of disengagement is frustrated, however, by a tie that he cannot sever. Remarking on the calm that sets in after he has adopted his attitude of epoché, he says: "But it was a horrible calm—because of my body; my body, I saw with its eyes, I heard with its ears, but it was no longer me, it sweated and trembled by itself and I didn't recognize it anymore." His description of the "horrible calm" he feels is faintly reminiscent of Tom's voicing his incomprehensibility of his death. However, whereas Tom balked at imagining his body not being animate, Pablo is aghast that his body exists and behaves independently of his conscious ego. The involuntary reactions of his body infringe on the detached integrity of his consciousness, and he rejects his body as an integral part of his being. Yet the tie still holds between his conscious self and what he considers a bothersome attachment. "Everything that came from my body," he says, "was all cockeyed. Most of the time it was quiet and I felt no more than a sort of weight, a filthy presence against me; I had the impression of being tied to an enormous vermin." His body is something from which he cannot escape. He can try to banish his emotional attachments and his values, and he can steel himself so that on seeing Juan weep he will be able to resist pitying himself and others, but he cannot break free from his body. The existence of his body as a constituent of his being is something that in his epoché he cannot deny, however much he struggles to achieve an independence from its effects on his state of mind.

In his desire for understanding, Pablo has ignored what for Sartre is a natural source of understanding—his emotions. Immediate awareness is not the only mode of consciousness. Emotion, he says, "is a mode of existence of consciousness, one of the ways in which it understands (in the Heideggerian sense of Verstehen) its 'being-in-the-world'." In rejecting the terrified responses of his body, Pablo rejects the tie that holds him to his predicament; but in so doing he also rejects a form of understanding. He has deceived himself as to the true nature of his project. His desire is not for dispassionate understanding or awareness; it is for escape.

In the second section Sartre has presented three ways in which an individual might deal with "a wall" against which he has been driven. According to Sartre's theory of emotions such actions are conscious and take on the character of moral attitudes for which the agent is responsible. For Tom and Juan the moral implications of their decisions are clear: Tom deals authentically with his fate, whereas Juan by collapsing seeks to abandon responsibility for his actions. But in Pablo's project of disengagement Sartre presents the interesting situation of one who both accepts and denies his predicament. Yet it is not clear at the end of the second section what the moral implications of his actions are. The reader is still not certain that Pablo has lied to the Falangists, although enough about his past is presented to suggest it.

When dawn finally comes, Tom and Juan are taken out to be shot. Pablo, however, is once more interrogated by the soldiers about Gris. He now realizes that the night he spent in the coal cellar has been psychological torture bent on breaking his will and forcing him to reveal where Gris is. Seeing through his captors' "shocking and burlesqued" behavior, he says: "I almost felt like laughing. It takes a lot to intimidate a man who is going to die . . . " The soldiers offer Pablo his life in exchange for his telling them where Gris is hiding. But Pablo continues to lie, insisting that he does not know where Gris is. The offer of his life for information about Gris is a shift in the basic Constant situation confronting Pablo. Instead of simply having the predicament of choosing to lie or tell the truth, he now has the choice of his life for Gris's.

Locked in a laundry room to consider the Falangist's offer, Pablo ponders his refusal to inform on his friend. Given his project of detachment his allegiance to Gris should be something that he abandons just as he professes to abandon his tie to Concha. His resistance to telling the soldiers what they want to know puzzles him. He questions himself: "Only I would have liked to understand the reasons for my conduct. I would rather die than give up Gris. Why? I didn't like Ramon Gris any more. My friendship for him had died a little while before dawn at the same time as my love for Concha, at the same time as my desire to live." Pablo attempts to explain his resistance to inform on Gris as being due to obstinacy. Yet this is rather lame conjecture. The thought of being obstinate pops into his mind; he accepts it as if he could make himself have whatever motives he imagines. His off-hand way of arriving at this explanation casts suspicion on its being some deep insight. His puzzlement as to his motive contrasts sharply with his perspicacious seeing through his captors' schemes and his understanding of his companions' emotional responses.

Initially the reader might suppose that Pablo is correct in his judgment, given his past success in perceiving others' motives and plans. But in so doing the reader would be taken in by the narrator's authoritative point of view. Pablo is not infallible; later in the story his sense of understanding will be severely challenged. His deliberations should be seen as an attempt to reconcile a conflict between his misconstrued project of escape and his commitment to Gris. Since he cannot "stay clean" and at the same time preserve this commitment, he achieves a self-serving consistency by deceiving himself into believing that his loyalty is actually stubbornness. His explanation provides a motive which is consistent with his "staying clean," since he views his obstinacy as a spontaneous quirk rather than as the expression of an established character trait.

The soldiers return in a while. Convinced that he is "clean," Pablo fancies the soldiers as so many players in a farce. He responds to their questions by inventing a scenario for himself and the soldiers to act out. He tells them that Gris is hiding in the cemetery. He wants to get the soldiers to search the cemetery and make fools of themselves. "I represented," he says, "the situation to myself as if I had been someone else: This prisoner obstinately playing the hero, these grim falangistas with their moustaches and their men in uniform running among the graves; it was irresistibly funny." What Pablo tells the soldiers is as much a lie as his previous disclaimer about Gris's hiding place. Not believing Gris to be in the cemetery, he gleefully anticipates the satisfaction he will receive from their futile expedition.

As if responding to his cue, the soldiers set off for the cemetery. Prepared for his imminent execution, Pablo waits the soldiers' return, gloating over his imagined victory. But when the soldiers do return, no execution order is given. Instead, he is sent out into the hospital yard to join some other prisoners. Disoriented by such an unexpected turn of events, he wanders around the yard in a daze. While earlier he had struggled to maintain a clarity of mind, he is now confused and oblivious to his surroundings. He does not understand why he has been spared and does not realize (until the baker Garcia tells him) that the soldiers have found Gris in the cemetery—precisely where he told them to look. Pablo's project of understanding has come crashing down. He had undertaken the task of detaching himself from the impinging world of his expected execution in order to perceive and understand all that took place around him during his last hours alive. He had felt confident in his detachment. Although he had taken, as he says, a "malicious" delight in sending the soldiers off on what he believed was a futile expedition, his detachment was preserved by his imagining the situation as if he had been "someone else." Confronting his captors, he had endeavored to maintain the removed stance of the "transcendental" observer and manipulator of events. Yet with his reprieve, he is thrown into confusion, his "transcendental" project exploded.

With the soldiers finding Gris in the cemetery, Sartre has introduced an elaboration on the Constant situation. This sort of situation is presented and discussed by Kant in his essay. There he presents the following example, intending to show that one can be held culpable if one lies in a Constant situation. I refer to the example as "K-l": "But if you had lied, and said he was not at home when he had really gone out without your knowing it, and if the murderer had then met him as he went away and murdered him, you might justly be accused as the cause of his death."

As a situation in which the decision-maker is claimed to be responsible for the friend's death, Kant's example highlights Sartre's similar assessment of Pablo's actions. In comparing K-l to the situation of Gris's capture, it is well to keep in mind that the decision-maker in K-l and Pablo both lie. Even though Pablo and the decision-maker say what happens to be true, both believe what they say to be false and both intend what they say to deceive their inquisitors. In K-l it is due to what the decision-maker says that the murderer finds his victim. This connection needs to be stressed in order for the congruence of the two situations to be seen.

If in a purported K-l situation there is at most a tenuous or non-existent connection between what the decision-maker says and the murderer's finding his victim, then one has a different moral situation. Such a similar sort of situation is assumed by Garcia the baker in his account of how the soldiers found Gris. I will refer to this variation on K-l as a "Garcia situation." In a Garcia situation nothing that the decision-maker says is causally responsible for the murderer finding the friend. The murderer stumbles on him by chance, or because he happens to look in a place (e.g. a cemetery) that is a likely hiding place. According to Garcia, that the soldiers found Gris is entirely his own fault; Gris chose to hide in the cemetery. "Of course," Garcia says, "they [the soldiers] went by there this morning, that was sure to happen." In the Garcia situation, Sartre offers a case in which the decision-maker is not responsible for the death; it is a case that contrasts with the one in which Pablo plays a role and for which he is in Sartre's view morally responsible.

Kant uses his example to argue that if one departs from the duty always to tell the truth one can be held responsible for unforeseeable consequences of one's actions. He states in the article: "Therefore, whoever tells a lie, however well intentioned he might be, must answer for the consequences, however unforeseeable they were . . . " While Sartre neither shared Kant's view on truth telling, nor subscribes to Kant's de-ontological ethical system, he is interested in the issue of responsibility for one's actions, responsibility that extends even to unforeseeable consequences of one's actions. And just as Kant claims that the decision-maker is responsible for the friend's death in K-l, so Sartre—by his use of Kant's example (and as his later theory of strict responsibility in Being and Nothingness confirms)—implies that Pablo is responsible for Gris's capture.

In Being and Nothingness Sartre holds that everyone is absolutely responsible for what happens to him or her. This responsibility is a consequence of what Sartre holds is a conscious being's radical freedom. I am responsible for, in fact I choose, all that I do not stop from happening to me. He says: "For lack of getting out of it [a situation] I have chosen it." And in a most significant passage for "The Wall," Sartre says: "the most terrible situation of war, the worst tortures do not create a non-human state of things; there is no non-human situation. It is only through fear, flight and recourse to magical types of conduct that I shall decide on the non-human, but this decision is human, and I shall carry the entire responsibility for it." Non-human situations would be those in which we would not be held morally responsible for our behavior. Likely candidates might be battles, tortures, or the terrifying psychological predicament that the three prisoners face. However, Sartre insists that all such situations are "human" ones and that magical attempts to escape such situations are also actions for which we are responsible.

In Sartre's view, Pablo is responsible for Gris's capture. His magical escape instigated the scenario that led the soldiers to Gris. Believing himself "clean," Pablo thinks that he can act with impugnity. However, he is mistaken. "I am responsible," says Sartre in Being and Nothingness, "for everything, in fact, except for my very responsibility, for I am not the foundation of my being." But Pablo believes that it is within his power to extend or retract his responsibility. A major fault with Pablo's magical project is that he thinks that he can rebuild the "foundation" of his being, to choose what he will be responsible for. And, ultimately, Sartre's criticism of Husserl is that the project of epoché lends credence to the idea that one can select the moral foundation of one's being. Pablo's selective responsibility is illustrated by his deliberations on whether to inform on Gris. He ponders: ". . . I could save my skin and give up Gris and I refused to do it. I found that somehow comic; it was obstinacy." Pablo rationalizes that his refusal is due to a quirk rather than a choice based on a commitment: "Undoubtedly I thought highly of him [Gris]: he was tough. But it was not for this reason that I consented to die in his place; his life had no more value than mine; no life had value. They were going to slap a man up against a wall and shoot him till he died, whether it was I or Gris or somebody else made no difference." Since both lives are worthless, he thinks, there is no rational basis for preferring one over the other. The matter is decided by his obstinacy rather than by his deliberated choice. He realizes that he faces a choice, but he is self-deceived in thinking that he need not choose.

By presenting the consequences of Pablo's self-deceived project of epoché, Sartre has attempted to show the folly of such an endeavor. Pablo's project functions as a counterexample to Husserl's thesis that use of the epoché allows one both to perceive the world objectively and to witness the separated, transcendental nature of the self. For Sartre, Pablo's "escape" is an example of a plausible interpretation of epoché. Pablo undertakes his magical project in order to free himself from the distortion of emotional reaction and to observe all that happens to him objectively. Instead of awareness, however, all he ends up with is confusion. He is aware of neither his commitments nor his motives for his behavior. Instead of being the detached author of events, he becomes the manipulated one.

In the final section Pablo, dazed and confused, hears Garcia's interpretation of Gris's capture. His reaction to the account indicates that he realizes the truth about what has happened. "Everything began to spin," he says, "and I found myself sitting on the ground: I laughed so hard I cried." His outburst belies his earlier denial of any commitment to Gris; it reveals to him that his explanation of his motive as being due to obstinacy is a sham. His reaction is out of character for someone who has rejected as worthless his own and his comrade's life and is simply acting out of stubbornness.

Pablo's laugh/cry marks, I believe, a flash of insight—not only about Gris's capture but also about there being certain moral boundaries of his life. The confusion of wandering in the yard has been replaced by an understanding: not a detached state of understanding such as he longed for during the vigil in the cell, but a comprehension about his own deception. Perceiving his causal role in Gris's capture makes him aware that what had earlier seemed to him to be the very expression of his detached state of "staying clean"—his sending the soldiers on an expedition to the cemetery—was in fact an action with telling consequences for his previous and continuing commitments.

That Pablo's outburst is a stroke of insight rather than a reaction of ironic surprise is not obvious, given the brevity of the incident. Described in the last sentence of the story, his response has very little context within which to fix its meaning. As an ending to the story, the laugh/cry certainly functions as a release of the tension built up over the course of the story. However, by limiting the interpretation of the ending to a device for the release of tension, one ignores the ending's status as a resolution of the point of this didactic story. Given Sartre's use of Kant's example, the ending serves as Pablo's final understanding of the moral repercussions of his project to "stay clean."

Interpreting the ending as insight is corroborated if one notices Sartre's similar use of the laugh/cry in his contemporary novel Nausea. In the novel Sartre provides more textual background with which to gauge the meaning of the outburst. Roquentin, the narrator and protagonist, during the course of the book develops an awareness of "the meaning of 'existence'"; he sees "existence" as an incontrovertible, brute fact which in its "frightful, obscene nakedness" is "the very paste of things"—not something convenient for use but something independent of human manipulation. While dining in a restaurant, he gazes around at the other diners, and breaks into a laugh/cry. The provocation for his reaction is a fantasy he has had. He muses:

What a comedy! All these people sitting there, looking serious, eating. . . . Each one of them has his little personal difficulty which keeps him from noticing that he exists . . . but I know I exist and that they exist. And if I knew how to convince people I'd go and sit down next to that handsome white-haired gentleman and explain to him just what existence means. I burst out laughing at the thought of the face he would make. . . . I'd like to stop but I can't; I laugh until I cry.

There are a number of significant similarities between the laugh/cry in Nausea and in "The Wall." In the novel, the laugh/cry marks both the collapse of Roquentin's fantasy of explaining "existence" to the white-haired gentleman and an acknowledgment of the ridiculousness of such a project. It also indicates a shift from Roquentin's noticing the diners' "seriousness" to his reflexive realization of the futility of his extraordinary attempt at explanation. His reaction is more than a response to something overwhelmingly funny; it expresses an achievement of understanding: he sees the "seriousness" of the diners as a blindness to their own "existence." But as Roquentin later remarks, "nothing that exists can be comic," so the laugh turns to a cry. In recognizing the diners' incomprehension as well as the senselessness of his own remedial response, Roquentin signals his understanding of existence.

In "The Wall" similar conditions precede Pablo's laugh/cry. First, there is the failure of his fantasized scenario. Upon hearing Garcia's tale, Pablo realizes that his fantasy with the soldiers has vaporized. He sees now who has been made to look foolish. Previously brought to the brink of laughter by what he claimed was the soldiers' "seriousness" in their roles as captors, Pablo now sees his own attitude and behavior as having been reality-denying. Whereas he had thought that it was the soldiers who did not realize their participation in some low form of comedy, Pablo now sees that he has been the one acting out the farce. Faced with this failure and reversal, he perceives that his other fantasized project has also failed—he has not "stayed clean." His attempt to sever the ties between his present state of consciousness and his past identity has failed. In telling the soldiers to go to the cemetery he has acted in ignorance and has blundered like the unsuspecting animal he most dreaded becoming. Pablo's laugh/cry is an acknowledgment of his failure and, given Sartre's view on the cognitive character of emotions, a sign of awareness of his self-deception.

The laugh/cry marks Pablo's awareness of both the failure of his project of detachment and his responsibility for Gris's death. This achievement of insight underscores Sartre's thesis that there are moral boundaries to human existence and that one of these limits is the responsibility for one's actions. Husserl's view of transcendental subjectivity, by separating the self from the world, challenges Sartre's view. Sartre seeks to argue against Husserl by presenting through his use of Kant's example a counterexample to Husserl's view. Pablo's flash of insight is Sartre's emphatic pronouncement that responsibility for one's actions is a condition of human existence, a condition from which one cannot escape.