Jean-Paul Sartre Writing Style

A man bends to skim a stone into the sea, feels something in his hand turn against him, and drops it without throwing. That is the first scene Sartre gives you in Nausea, and it is a fair sample of the method. He begins with a body doing something ordinary. Then he refuses to let the ordinary thing stay ordinary, and the refusal is where the prose lives, because Roquentin has to write down what the stone did to him and keeps failing to say it plainly.

Every Sartre narrator is building a case. Where Camus lets Meursault report his mother's funeral and decline to say what it meant, Roquentin cannot stop saying what things mean, and the compulsion is the character. The perception comes first and stays concrete, then a second sentence arrives to tell you what the perception proves about the person having it. Pablo Ibbieta, waiting to be shot in The Wall, watches a Belgian doctor sit with the condemned and take notes, and works out that he has already become an item in someone else's observation. The reader gets the doctor's chair.

He earned the right to that second sentence by attacking another novelist for skipping it. In his essay on François Mauriac, Sartre accused a senior writer of standing above his heroine and handing readers a verdict on her instead of leaving her free inside the scene. The complaint is technical. A novelist who explains a character has closed the case before the reader can sit on the jury, and Sartre's own fiction spends its energy keeping that case open while the evidence piles up.

Two things transfer to your own desk. First, that a thought is an action, because a character who reasons is usually defending herself, and the reasoning can be timed, interrupted and caught out exactly like a lie told out loud. Second, that description is evidence. If a detail cannot be used against someone later, Sartre leaves it out.

The alibi in the character's own voice

The narration borrows a character's excuse and reports it as fact. James Wood calls the general technique free indirect style and asks the useful question about it: whose word is this? Sartre pushes that question hard. When Roquentin's diary explains why he has abandoned his book on Rollebon, the explanation sounds like the truth of the situation until you notice it is also exactly what a man would say who could not face the work, and the sentence holds both readings without choosing. That is the tool. Report the self-justification straight, in the voice of the person who needs it, and let a detail elsewhere in the scene do the disagreeing.

The witness switch

A character doing something becomes a character being seen doing it. The change is fast and physical, and Sartre times it to the sentence, so a reader feels the person reassemble themselves for an audience. Estelle in No Exit cannot see herself and asks Inès to be her mirror. Inès agrees, then describes a pimple. The power moves inside one line. It works when the observer has an interest of their own, and it dies when the observer was wheeled in to raise the temperature.

The object that will not behave

Baxter warns writers off the setting that only mirrors the character, the sad man among sad trees. Sartre's best objects break that pattern by refusing to mean what the character needs them to mean, and their menace comes from the refusal. The chestnut root is not sad. It sits there being more than any word Roquentin has for it, and his failure to name it is the event of the scene, so the description carries the argument an essay would otherwise have to make. Choose one thing per scene and let it outlast the interpretation.

The claimed act

He ends scenes by making somebody own what they did, out loud, in the wrong company. Orestes at the close of The Flies takes the killings as his and walks out of Argos with the flies behind him, and his refusal to plead is the whole ending. The move costs no new information and is still hard to write. Hard, because the character has to give up the account of themselves they have been maintaining all along. Build toward the sentence where a person stops saying it happened and starts saying I did it.

The label accepted from outside

People in Sartre get named by others and then move into the name. In his book on Jean Genet he reads one such moment as the origin of a life: a child reaches into a drawer, somebody says thief, and the child decides to be one. Lucien Fleurier in The Childhood of a Leader arrives at a self by the same route, out of borrowed opinions rather than a single word. Give a character a word somebody else used about them. Let them turn it against themselves later, and keep the word roughly accurate, because a label that misses is one the character can shrug off.

The body's dissenting evidence

In The Wall, Pablo notices that his shirt is soaked through although he believes he is not afraid, and the Belgian doctor sees it too. The body contradicts the account the character is keeping of himself, and Sartre lets the contradiction stand unresolved. This is cheaper and stronger than introspection. Sweat, a tremor, a grip that is too firm, a voice sitting a third too high: a character cannot comment on any of these without tangling themselves further. Keep them small. One physical denial per scene is enough, and two will cancel each other out.

Cross-cut simultaneity

The Reprieve runs the week of the Munich crisis by cutting between characters inside a single paragraph, sometimes inside a sentence, so that a man in Paris and a man on a road in the south occupy the same breath. Sartre took the method from Dos Passos, whom he wrote about with open admiration, and he uses it for a specific effect: a private decision looks different when it is pressed against a hundred other people deciding. The cut buys scale without exposition. It also removes the excuse of privacy, since no character in the book gets to think alone. Handled badly it reads as a stunt. It works here because each cut lands on a person doing something with their hands, and the reader is not asked to hold an abstraction across the join.

The diary as evidence

Nausea presents itself as found notebooks, complete with a publisher's note and words marked illegible. The apparatus does real work. A dated entry can contradict the one before it, a crossing-out can show a man editing his own file, and the reader is handed the position of someone examining a document rather than someone being told a story. Roquentin is his own unreliable witness, which lets Sartre write interior monologue without the softness interior monologue usually brings. The alternative would be a narrator who explains. This one leaves the explaining half-finished, on purpose, and the gaps are where you do the work.

Retrospective irony

In The Words the older voice grades the child he used to be, and the grading is merciless and comic at once. He shows a boy who learned that performing delighted the adults, then performed, then believed the performance, and the memoir forgives none of those stages. Two time signatures share the page. The device gives him a way to write the formation of a self without a single line of psychology, because the judgment sits in the tense, in the placement of a dry adjective, in an older man's refusal to look away. Distance is the tool. Use it and you can be tender and damning inside one clause.

The refused exit

Garcin gets the door open. He has spent the whole play wanting out of that drawing room, the lock gives, the corridor is there, and he stays, which turns the room from a punishment into a choice and lands the play's argument without a line of argument. The device is portable. Give a character a genuine way out at the moment they are complaining loudest about being trapped, then let them decline it and write down what they say next. The declining has to be silent. Once someone explains why they stayed you have painted the theme on the wall, and the reader will believe the explanation instead of the refusal.

Writing the essay and calling it a chapter

The temptation with a thinker is to let the thinking off the leash and hope the reader keeps up. Sartre pays for his abstraction by keeping a body in the frame even at his most essayistic, and the museum chapter of Nausea is the proof: Roquentin walks a gallery of civic portraits, and what looks like an argument about the bourgeoisie is a man moving from face to face and losing his temper. The reader keeps a room to stand in. Take the room away and the prose has nothing to push against, so the sentences get longer, the claims get bigger, and the whole thing ends up addressed to the ceiling. Reflection in his fiction is a continuation of action, thought as self-defense under pressure, and it stops working the moment it stops belonging to somebody.

Copying the bleakness

His books are funnier than their reputation. The Wall ends with a man laughing until he cannot stand up, and the Self-Taught Man in Nausea, working through the town library in alphabetical order, is a comic invention well before he is a pathetic one. Gloom is a verdict, and a verdict handed down early kills the investigation, because a reader stops looking for evidence once they know how it ends. It also flattens the character. Where outcomes are doomed the choices stop weighing anything, and his whole structure depends on choices weighing something, which is why his darkness comes from watching a person choose badly while insisting there was no choice.

Naming bad faith instead of building it

Charles Baxter has a phrase for the prose this produces: mistakes were made. He means the sentence that reports a wrong without an agent, and he tracks what happens to a story whose people stop acting and start being acted upon, which is that consequence drains out and the details lose their hierarchy. Labeling is the same failure at close range. Write the stages instead: the claim, the fact that will not fit it, the repair, the cost of the repair. Sartre puts a reader half a step ahead of the character, so we get there first and then watch the character arrive, and that lag is the whole pleasure.

Playing the gaze as a breakdown

The scene of being seen is not a collapse. Sartre writes it as a correction, and corrections are small: the voice drops a register, the sentence gets shorter, a hand finds itself something to do. Play it loud and you spend on one page what could have paid out over fifty. The Condemned of Altona is the long version of the same pressure, with Frantz shut upstairs for years, recording speeches to an imagined tribunal of the future while the family below maintains the arrangement that keeps him there. The house stays quiet. The pressure holds because the reactions stay believable, and a reader will follow a person managing an unbearable fact far longer than they will follow a person announcing one.