When I was first exposed to existentialism in high school, I thought it was the coldest, most horrifying philosophy I'd ever heard. This sentiment came on the heels of The Stranger by Albert Camus, a book that left me feeling dark and isolated and emotionless. Whenever I heard someone mention existentialism after that, I closed my ears instantaneously. In a literature class my second year of college, however, we talked a little about Kierkegaard - not enough for me to be able to really say anything about his philosophies or main ideas, but enough to make me wonder if existentialism was as horrifically awful as I'd previously thought. So for my Paris in July themed Short Story Spotlight, I decided to reread a story by Sartre, "The Wall."
"The Wall" follows a group of soldiers through the night before their execution. The narrator, Pablo, becomes detached from his life with the knowledge that he will be killed in the morning. He perceives himself as dead, and believes that he can't go back to living now because he has the concept of himself as mortal, that all of life would simply be the waiting he experienced in the cell waiting for his death. He comes to the conclusion that life has no value - whether he dies or another dies, it makes no difference, because they will all die - nothing can change that simple fact. Oh, right, this is why I was horrified by the concept. I was seventeen and immortal when I read this story for the first time.
Sartre also explores the concept of the absurd in this story - the fact that certain events occur in life that have no meaning and are ridiculous. One must rise above them. I think this is best understood by reading Camus's piece "The Myth of Sisyphus," another piece that was appalling to me in my idealistic high school years.
I wish I had a better understanding of existentialism. Only very occasionally do I wish that I had taken more English and literary theory classes. I wish that I had a better knowledge base for interpreting works that are philosophical or more difficult (but only occasionally because I think too much analysis blocks out the beauty and the story, which, for me, is the main point of literature - experiencing beauty in another human experience).
Anyway, this story gave me the interesting chance to review a philosophy I had blocked out in high school and to revisit the reason it horrified me then and may have some merits now (don't get me wrong, I would never subscribe to it fully, but I can see the interesting elements in the bleakness now). "The Wall" is a good little introduction to Parisian existentialism.
