Final Partial Essay.

Hello everyone,

In this essay I worked again with my classmate Allison Tenorio.

“Freedom"

This essay pretends to analyze the works “The Wall” and “Erostratus”, both works of Jean Paul Sartre with the objective of comparing and contrasting them, characters and plays in general, finding similarities and differences among them. Connecting topics such as existentialism, it means, trying to understand the way he saw life and death too, and trying to explain through these works one of his phrases which said: “It is just necessary a man hating another one for hate to reach humanity”. This handwritten tries to interpret these two works of Sartre for getting closer to know him and to understand better what he felt and what he thought that took him to write jobs like these ones.

In our last partial, the class had the opportunity of analyzing the works mentioned behind, which is very interesting because both were made by the same author and so it allows to have a perspective of how he was, what he thought and what he felt for being able to make those jobs. First, both stories have something to do with dead and with the perceptions that humans have among this fact. In the video of “The Wall” it shows a locked man (Pablo Salinas) who is threatened with being killed if he doesn’t tells something and he has to pass through a lot of time alone with his thoughts just expecting the moment where the police officers are coming just to shoot him in the head and kill him. Despite that, he prefers it than telling them where his friend (Facundo Ramos) is hiding. Unfortunately because of a matter of destiny, bad luck or something like that, Salinas tells the officers a fake location of Ramos but at the end he discovers that the location was not fake, he betrayed his friend, indeed.

While in “Erostratus”, the story is totally different because it is about a man (Paul Hilbert) who can’t be with people, who is a killer and is scared that others know this fact, because he is aware that it is bad to wish to harm others without a good reason and Paul believes that he won’t be brave enough to kill anyone else without getting punished by society. Then, he decides to plan his crime in such a way that he would be able to get away without being recognised and without dealing with people reactions, but then when he finally finds the courage to do it, he is so excited that his plan changes completely and ends getting caught at a public bathroom.

Although the context of this two stories is very different, they are very similar in their core because in both it is shown the existentialism of Sartre showing us the fragility of the human being, how easy life can end and how this is totally out of our control. Also, in this works it is appreciated a lack of freedom and a desperation of trying to get it, unfortunately it is just obtained in “The Wall” because as it can be seen in “Erostratus”, the main character is caught and so he doesn’t make it but in the first one, the main character ends by getting its freedom at the expense of his best friend but he didn’t had the intention that things ended the way did, but might have been because of bad luck.

Secondly, in both works the main character is frightened about the fact of the death and because it sees that its death is out of its control. Also, as Sartre thought that existence is just for those who live free and in this works the main character is trapped, in different ways, but it is not free and then the author is able to express the lack of existentialism in both characters. Both main characters feel impotency when they get caught and when they can’t do anything to change their situation but Salinas at the end gets what he wanted and is not killed but he is sad when he notices that he is the responsable of their best friend’s death, while Hilbert reaches his objective too but finally isn’t successful with his escape. Also something that both characters have in common is their name, both are named Pablo just in another language.

Finally, it is easier to discover things from a person by knowing the way they think and what they desire than by asking personal information, which is good in this case because otherwise it wouldn’t have been possible to know all these incredible authors without their works, plays and stories for sharing them with society and for value them as treasures, because that is what they are treasures for humanity. By analyzing these stories it is proved that our main target was reached which was knowing better the way Sartre thought, what existentialism meant to him and connecting these two facts with his stories observing that both have his signature.

“Man is condemned to be free, because once he is in the world, he is responsible for everything he does”.

- Jean Paul Sartre.

References:

·         Anonymous, (2009), “Jean Paul Sartre Phrases”, Proverbia. Recovered from: http://www.proverbia.net/citasautor.asp?autor=894

·         Anonymous, (2008), “Biography of Jean Paul Sartre”, Thoughts and Phrases. Recovered from: http://www.frasesypensamientos.com.ar/autor/jean-paul-sartre.html

·         Suárez, P. (2013), “Jean Paul Sartre”, Philosophy on High School. Recovered from: http://www.webdianoia.com/contemporanea/sartre/sartre_filo.htm