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Sara Skye Huck David Baecker Modern Theater 11/18/10 “God is Dead” Adopting Existentialism in Post-Occupation When man is confronted with hardship his faith can swing one of two ways: either his faith will be strengthened, or his faith will be broken. This can be seen in the sudden popularity of existentialism and existentialist fiction in after the Occupation, specifically in No Exit and The Flies, by Jean-Paul Sartre and Waiting for Godot and Endgame, by Samuel Beckett. As contemporaries Beckett and Sartre have very similar lives that almost seem to parallel each other. The parallels between Beckett and Sartre are very interesting because both authors have very different ways of broadcasting their beliefs; Sartre being more outspoken about his philosophical views and Beckett keeping his views quietly. Existentialism is a philosophical idea that started with Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger in the 19th century. Famously, Nietzsche started the idea that ―God is dead,‖ and that we as humans were free and had to make our own decisions and take responsibility for the outcomes that might arise from said decisions. The idea was mainly discussed in groups of philosophers until the Post-World War II era, where the idea became very well known and rejuvenated by Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simon de Beauvoir as well as several other people who circled in and out of their little group (including Samuel Beckett). Existentialism works of a few basic truths: 

―First, sentient beings exist, then they spend a lifetime defining an individual essence;

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

All sentient life forms, namely humans, have free will;

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Every action, expression, or thought is the result of a decision;

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Decision making is a stressful, solitary act, even when part of a group; and

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Any decision can and usually does not have negative aspects.‖(Deloso, 3)

To sum up in a quick sentence existentialism is the idea that life is a series of choices that only you can make and in the end you are the sum of the choices that you make. Sartre made more amendments to this list, as he was first and foremost a philosopher contributed greatly to existentialism with new ideas.

Sartre Before he was drafted into World War II in 1939, Sartre was a teacher at Le Havre, and though he was interested in existentialism it wasn’t his chief philosophy. In 1939 he was drafted and served as a meteorologist in Alsace. He was captured in Padoux and spent a year in a prisoner of war camp in Nancy and then Trier. When he was finally released he went back to teaching and started to write about freedom in an effort to assert that which was taken away from him while he was in the war camp. Sartre became involved in the Resistance and wrote The Flies and No Exit. He also was able to write Being and Nothingness without being censored by the Nazis. The Flies and No Exit were Sartre’s way of dealing with the Occupation. They both preach freedom, which was lacking in occupied . After serving in the ―phony war‖ and being held captive it seems very natural to turn to existentialism for answers and stop believing in God ("Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)", 2010). Sartre once described how terrible the German occupation of was in an article in Le libre in 1944 shortly after the liberation. He

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described unbelievable despair and how the French were starved and humiliated by the Nazis and how they all we constantly in fear of being taken away by the Gestapo. He said, ―The evil was everywhere, every choice was a bad choice, and yet it was necessary to choose and we are responsible…‖(Sartre). Written in 1944, four years after Sartre’s time in a prisoner of war camp, No Exit (Huis Clos) is a quintessential example of a work of existential fiction. The play centers around three people in a room in purgatory and how they basically create a hell for themselves and each other. Garcin, one of the characters, sums up the whole play and says ―Hell is other people‖ (Sartre,47). The quote is loaded with existential meaning on Sartre’s end. What Sartre meant by this is that our view of ourselves is tainted by the people who we know and associate with, especially by the people we have bad relationships with. Those bad relationships color our perceptions of ourselves and then we seek validation from those people. That is when other people become hell. How can we be our authentic selves if we are always letting ourselves get caught up in how other people see us and acting out to try and to please them? By denying our absolute freedom we become inauthentic and lose a part of our selves. This can be seen in No Exit when Garcin stays in the room in hell so that he can try and get validation from Inez. The Flies is a retelling of the story of Electra and Orestes. The play focuses on the idea of freedom to make choices and take responsibility for them. It also has themes of what happens when you live for someone else instead of living for yourself. Through the whole play Orestes is trying to please Zeus until the very end when he renounces him. Orestes tells Zeus that he is not the king of men and says of mankind, ―They’re free; and human life begins on the far side of despair‖ (Sartre, 123). This echoes something that Sartre himself once said, ―Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does‖(Sartre).

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What this means is that mankind has the ability to do whatever it wants, but that means that if something terrible happens they have to take on the responsibility and guilt that comes from their decisions. Beckett Samuel Beckett was born in Ireland but settled down in Paris, in 1937. Beckett decided to stay in Paris during World War II and ed the French resistance. In 1942, after some of his friends were arrested by the Gestapo, he fled Paris with his wife and went to the unoccupied zone. However, Beckett did continue to aid the resistance from afar. It wasn’t until after had been liberated in 1945 that he returned to Paris and started writing. It was during this time that some of his greatest works were written, including Waiting for Godot (1949) and Endgame (1957) ("Beckett, Samuel [Barklay]." 2010). Waiting for Godot had echoes of Sartre’s existentialism. The core idea is that the two main characters, Vladimir and Estragon, are waiting for Godot. Without the extra –ot the two are waiting for God, and God never actually comes. This echoes Nietzsche’s ―God is dead,‖ in the fact that God is nowhere to be seen and these two tramps are sitting around waiting for him. At the same time Vladimir realizes that all this waiting around for something that will never come is futile and that living has become a series of just going through the motions of living, much like sleep walking through life, and he suddenly searches for meaning in a sort of soliloquy, ―Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? To-morrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of to-day?‖(Beckett, 193) His inertia causes him to question who he is and how he has been living. ―Existentialism requires constant thought, expression, and action – the active development of one’s essence‖ (Deloso, 3). Thus, Vladimir’s inertia causes him to question who

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he is and how he has been living. Perhaps Vladimir’s thoughts echo the quilt Beckett might have felt after he fled Paris when his friends were arrested. Endgame echoes the ideas seen in No Exit with the idea that living for other people is hellish. The play centers on a blind man, his charge, and his limbless parents in a postapocalyptic world. Nearly everyone in the play is trying to please one person, Hamm who is defining himself by the people he has around him. Clov and Hamm are completely interdependent on each other, Hamm needs Clov to be his eyes and his caretaker and Clov needs Hamm for approval, shelter, and company and they go on using each other until the end of the play. At the end of the play Clov realizes how little he has lived by being so attached to Hamm and that he, like Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, has been sleepwalking through life, ―I ask the words that remain—sleeping, waking, morning, evening. They have nothing to say‖ (Beckett, 81). What that means is that he’s still searching for his meaning in places other than himself. Finally, Clov decides to leave Hamm, who is alone at this point, but the audience never sees him actually leave because he stays at the door until the end of the play even though he is packed to leave. Where Sartre and Beckett Collide Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett are linked in many ways, but they are very different writers. Beckett wrote for Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s magazine Les Temps Modernes ("Beckett, Samuel [Barklay]." 2010). Both Beckett and Sartre were part of the French resistance, and they both were offered the Nobel Prize in Literature. However, Sartre did not accept the Nobel Prize and Beckett did. While Beckett was fleeing Sartre was writing literature that could have gotten him arrested. Sartre seems to be much braver than Beckett and it could be

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argued that his bravery came from his time in a prisoner of war camp. Perhaps Sartre had seen how life without freedom was and realized that freedom was too precious to just sit by idly and watch the Nazi’s take over his life, for the second time, without a good fight. Anita Brookner once said, ―Existentialism is about being a saint without God; being your own hero, without all the sanction and of religion or society.‖ It would be understandable that someone would adopt existentialism after seeing the atrocities of war or, as is the case for the French, the atrocities of the Occupation. Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett were able to capture the feelings of disillusionment in their plays because they were part of the shared consciousness of Paris Post-War. All of felt some sort of disconnect with their faith and a need to reassert their freedom, and existentialism helped them to reconcile their faith and get a better hold on their freedom.

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Works Cited "Beckett, Samuel [Barklay]." Continuum Encyclopedia of British Literature. London: Continuum, 2006. Credo Reference. Web. 28 November 2010. Beckett, Samuel. Endgame: a Play in One Act. New York, NY: Grove., 1958. Print. Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. Nine Plays of the Modern Theater. New York: Grove, 1990. 11599. Print. Deloso, Licenio. "The Truth of Existential Ethics: An Exposition." Web. 28 Nov. 2010. "Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)." Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work. London: Routledge, 2002. Credo Reference. Web. 2010. Sartre, Jean-Paul. No Exit. No Exit, and Three Other Plays. New York: Vintage, 1973. 3-47. Print. Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Flies. No Exit, and Three Other Plays. New York: Vintage, 1973. 51-131. Print. Sartre, Jean-Paul. "Paris under the Occupation." Raritan 24.3 (2005): 136-153. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Web. 28 Nov. 2010.