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Sarah attempts to get Mathieu to reconsider, but ultimately suggests a renowned, but expensive, doctor he can turn to. With her youth and good looks, she permeates much of the novel with a sense of loss—the ageing characters accept their 20s are gone, with the result being they seem to view Ivich as fragile and precious due to her youthful vulnerability. Ivich did not excuse him : that morning, as on all occasions, she would look at the pictures with her wild, maniacal air : Mathieu would stand beside her, ugly, persistent, and forgotten.
The central character is Mathieu Delarue who, quite frankly, you can’t help but presume represents Sartre. None of them have jobs (Mathieu has stopped work for the vacation) or children – they are completely free of timetables and responsibilities, utterly free to be as unhappy and negative as they please. But the feeling didn’t last: ‘Not for a moment,’ he said to himself, ‘did Mathieu cease to be balanced, composed, and in perfect accord with himself. Sartre was one of great cultural icons of the mid-twentieth century, the popular face of French existentialist philosophy which he wrote about in countless essays, articles, books and plays, and summarised in his epic and impenetrable treatise, Being and Nothingness.
A melodramatic element of the story rears itself here, as Sarah suddenly arrives to inform Delarue her Jewish medical professional is leaving for America and won’t do the operation. 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. By sinking his individuality into a strong disciplined political movement he has gained his individuality. 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.
Next morning Mathieu meets Ivich at the Dome cafe and they start drinking to get rid of their hangovers, when Boris appears completely dazed. In the years around the time of his death, however, existentialism declined in French philosophy and was overtaken by structuralism, represented by Levi-Strauss and, one of Sartre's detractors, Michel Foucault. Reader's noteBrighten your bookshelf with a spot of orange with this this 1964 edition of Jean-Paul Sartre's The Age of Reason.Economic slavery is a term that probably does not relate to this, but it is defining our freedom based upon the amount of money that we have. However, the beauty here is you don’t have to be interested in any of that lot to enjoy the book, which plays out with serious verve and imagination thanks largely to the exceptional group of characters Sartre depicts. Ivich is plain and prickly but Mathieu finds himself making a pass at her in a taxi on the way to an art exhibition.