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The French philosopher, novelist, and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80) served in the French army during this period and was interned as a prisoner of war in 1940. These experiences became the basis of Troubled Sleep (1949), the third volume of his trilogy, The Roads to Freedom. The second volume of the trilogy, The Reprieve, set in 1938, deals with the impact of the Munich Pact on a group of French citizens. Carrying over some of the main characters from the first two novels, Troubled Sleep depicts the French army, confused and demoralized, anticipating surrender with a mixture of shame and relief. Immediately following their surrender, while in a temporary camp, they are comparatively well treated by the Germans, raising hopes that they will soon be allowed to return to their homes. This illusion is cruelly shattered at the end of the novel when the troops discover that the cattle cars they are traveling on are taking them to labor camps inside Germany. For many of the prisoners, this marks a shocking revelation: "For the first time since September '39, this was war."
Troubled Sleep marks a significant advance for Sartre in his development as a novelist. In an earlier novel, Nausea (1938), he explored some of the central themes of existentialism, intensely focusing on the individual's subjective consciousness. In Troubled Sleep, he turns to the engagement of the individual with the forces of history in the context of ideological conflict. Writing in the aftermath of World War II, Sartre sees the subjective crisis explored in Nausea, transformed by the twin catastrophes of war and ignominious defeat. Private life fades in the face of the large collective spectacles of mass destruction and death, of refugees and defeated armies roaming aimlessly through the countryside. The protagonist of the first half of the novel, Mathieu, an intensely private soldier, a former philosophy teacher, chooses to go on waging a last-ditch battle immediately after the defeat as a way of affirming his freedom of choice: "Mathieu went on firing. . . . He was cleansed, he was all-powerful, he was free." The novel also dramatizes a political conflict between two political factions, the communist and the noncommunist left, as they come to terms with the defeat. Brunet, a committed communist, looks on the internment of French prisoners as an opportunity to capitalize on their discontent, creating more converts to communism. His fellow prisoners are merely the means to his goal--the ultimate triumph of communism. Schneider, a fellow prisoner, sympathetic to the party in certain respects, perceives Brunet's flaw. "What worries me is that you don't seem particularly fond of us." In the final scene Brunet discovers the total estrangement from ordinary human feeling that his commitment to the party has created. He has lost a sense of his individual identity in pursuit of a collective dream.
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