| In this dissertation, I examine the interdependence of Jean-Paul Sartre's literature and philosophy. Specifically, I explore how literature can articulate certain existential insights regarding the development of personal identity. To begin this endeavor, I expand the claim made by Martha Nussbaum in Love's Knowledge that literary texts are indispensable to moral philosophy, arguing that literary works are also essential to phenomenology and ontology. I argue that Jean-Paul Sartre's fictional works are essential to his philosophic project because these works are able to convey certain existential insights which abstract philosophic prose cannot. The dissertation focuses primarily on Sartre's relational theory of the subject, specifically how the subject's interactions with the world and with other individuals serve to inform that subject's sense of self. Though a number of Sartre's philosophical and fictional works will be discussed, my focus is directed toward Being and Nothingness, Nausea, and Sartre's trilogy The Roads to Freedom. Through a discussion of these works, I explain how certain concepts like absurdity, bad faith and being-for-others are better captured by the narrative than by the abstract philosophical style present in Being and Nothingness and Sartre's other philosophic works. With respect to the central theme of the development of self-identity, I compare Sartre's theory of the self to several contemporary theories of identity-formation, namely those of Paul Ricoeur, Lorraine Code, and Norbert Wiley. Though Sartre's theory of the self has been criticized widely and is often seen as being incompatible with contemporary theories which emphasize the relational nature of subjectivity, I demonstrate why these criticisms are misplaced. I use Sartre's fictional works to illustrate the intersubjective elements of his theory of the subject and offer an argument for why Sartre's work is relevant to contemporary discussions of identity. |
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