The Age of Reason
The first volume of Sartre's Roads to Freedom trilogy, following philosophy lecturer Mathieu Delarue through forty-eight hours in 1938 Paris as he tries to raise money for an abortion and confronts his inability to commit to anything without feeling it constrains his freedom.
Summary
Mathieu Delarue is thirty-four, teaches philosophy in Paris, and has spent his adult life arranging his affairs to preserve maximum freedom: no marriage, no political commitments, no lasting obligations. His mistress Marcelle is pregnant and he needs money for an abortion. Over two days in June 1938 he borrows, begs, and finally steals to raise it, and refuses every chance to commit to anything, to Marcelle or to the Communist Party.
Sartre builds the irony into the structure. Mathieu's obsession with keeping his freedom is itself the constraint: he is committed to a self-image of freedom, and holding it requires refusing every concrete engagement. By the end he has the money, Marcelle has agreed to marry his friend Daniel instead, and Mathieu can see that his freedom produced nothing.
The novel is Sartre doing existentialism in fiction rather than philosophy: showing what bad faith looks like from the inside of a person who intellectually understands his own situation and cannot act on that understanding. Mathieu knows what authentic commitment would require. He cannot make it.
Daniel, who marries Marcelle for reasons that humiliate him, is the more interesting character. He acts against his own desires and values, and that act is more his own than anything Mathieu does.
The prose is sharper and more readable than Being and Nothingness.
Quotes
"He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death-weight about with him for years to come."