Paper Title
Jean-Paul Sartre’s “The Wall”: A Study of “Being” and “Death”
Abstract
The objective of this paper titled “Jean-Paul Sartre’s “The Wall”: A Study of “being” and “death” is to
understand Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of the “being” through a study of the relationship between the ideas of “being” and
“death” in his short story “The Wall”. Sartre, an existentialist philosopher and writer has extensively discoursed on the
subject of “being” in his philosophical and literary works such as “Being and Nothingness”, “Existentialism Is a
Humanism”, “The Wall”, “No Exit”, “The Flies” and such others. This paper is primarily concerned with the study of the
ideas of being and death in Pablo, the protagonist of “The Wall”. Some of Sartre’s major existential concepts such as,
“existence precedes essence”, “being-for-itself” and “bad faith” are portrayed through the character of Pablo. Contemplation
on Sartre’s “being” is also a meditation on his concept of death. Death is not physical death per se, but death of fixated ideas
and concepts. Thus, an exploration into the concept of death paves the way for a study of the idea of the “being”. In this
paper, terms such as “being”, “self”, “person” and “personhood” are used interchangeably as they refer to ideas akin to the
concept of “personhood”.
Index Terms— Being, Existence, Self, Death, Nothingness, Being-for-itself, Essence, Bad Faith.