The Age of Reason (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Sartre shows how difficult it can be to take charge of one's own life -- to accept that one has the responsibilities that come with 'the age of reason' -- and none of his characters achieve it in this volume. The most schematic part of the book is the character of Brunet, who is an almost comical stereotype of the Strong, Conscientious Communist. Realising the game is up, he finally levels with her (although, frankly, surely Ivich should have figured this out by now, which kind of indicates the self-indulgent frame of mind she’s often in). For instance, the person who takes out a massive loan for an impressive car and spends money on things that they cannot afford can find that when the money runs out or the creditors come knocking on their door, they discover that the friends that they thought they had are no longer around.

It's one of the most effective passages I know on the subject of why it generally isn't a good idea to want to kill yourself. He thought: ‘A married man messing about with a young girl in a taxi,’ and his arm dropped, dead and flaccid: Ivich’s body straightened with a mechanical jerk, like a pendulum swinging back to equilibrium. However, the catch is that while we may define ourselves, in many cases we are the only people who understand and respond to that definition because everybody else perceives reality differently, and in perceiving reality differently, we respond to reality differently.But she is only the most extreme example of the quality all the characters share, Sartre’s own disgust and revulsion at life, of being alive, of being human. Mathieu goes back to his apartment, where in fact he’d left Ivich sobering up after getting paralytic at lunch time after she’d learned she’d failed her exams and would be sent back to her wretched bourgeois home in the country.

It’s at this point he makes a bizarre, seemingly deadly mistake during a taxi ride to the latest museum exhibition. Again, this is central to existentialism’s atheistic outlook – we are free agents in the world who decide our fate, with the idea being to live as morally sound a life as possible. Daniel Sereno is the extremely good looking gay friend of Mathieu, although they don’t appear to get on particularly well. The thought of manipulating his ‘friend’ amuses the cynical Daniel (‘When Mathieu adopted a Quakerish attitude, Daniel hated him’, p.It’s also my favourite from the trilogy—whilst the Reprieve and Iron in the Soul are profound and moving, there’s a certain unmatchable edge to Age of Reason which is delivered through its detailed analysis of its lead characters.

Entering chapter 12 and the final 100 pages of the novel, a series of events force Delarue towards the culmination of his predicament. In this chapter, he’s introduced as the good looking student who’s dating the much older Lola—a singer in Parisian clubs. Those uninitiated with Sartre might just get too engrossed with the plot, when the very essence of this work lies beneath all the love affairs, affairs without love, suicides or attempts, abortions and pregnancies, communism and Zionism, politics and philosophy and the like.Sartre’s philosophy is contained in the phrase; ‘existence precedes essence’ meaning that man is not born with an intrinsic value but creates a value with his own will and actions. It has two effects in that in one case existentialism is us making a concerted effort to define ourselves (such as me being the straight guy that pretends he knows nothing about brothels and sits in the Crown Casino reading a book) and the outward effects of that definition, in that people see who you are and respond to this.