The Words (book) explained

The Words
Title Orig:	Les Mots
Translator:	Bernard Frechtman
Author:	Jean-Paul Sartre
Country:	France
Genre:	Autobiography
Language:	French
Publisher:	Gallimard
Release Date:	1963
English Release Date:	September 1964
Media Type:	Print (hardback and paperback)
Pages:	255
Oclc:	455681411
Dewey:	848.91409
Congress:	PQ2637 .A82

The Words (French: Les Mots) is the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre's 1963^[1] autobiography.

Structure and presentation

The text is divided into two near-equal parts entitled 'Reading' (Lire) and 'Writing' (Écrire). However, according to Philippe Lejeune, these two parts are only a façade and are not relevant to the chronological progression of the work. He considers the text to instead be divided into five parts which he calls 'acts':

• The first act presents in chronological order the 'prehistory' of the child by giving his family origin.
• The second act evokes the different roles Sartre acted out in his seclusion to an imaginary world, enabled by his family.^[1]
• The third act tells of his conscious realization of his imposture, his contingency, his fear of death and his ugliness.
• The fourth act presents the development of a new imposture, in which Sartre took up multiple different postures of writing.
• The fifth act relates Sartre's delusion, which he considers the source of his dynamism, and contains the announcement of a second book which he did not complete before his death.

The first title which Sartre thought of was Jean sans terre.^[2]

Reception

The book, consisting of Sartre distancing himself from writing and making his farewells to literature was very successful for the author and was hailed nearly unanimously as a "literary success". In November of the same year, 1964, he refused the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded for his work, described as "rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, [it] has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age."^[3]

Notes and References

1. http://www.is.wayne.edu/raronson/Books/JPS/Part4/Chap1/Chap1.htm Aronson, Ronald. 1980. Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World.
2. Book: Boulé, Jean-Pierre . Sartre, Self-formation, and Masculinities . 2005 . Berghahn Books . 978-1-57181-742-6 . en.
3. Web site: The Nobel Prize in Literature 1964 .