The Age of Reason (Penguin Modern Classics)

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French author and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was awarded (and declined) the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature. In other words, as humans we exist first, but then we do things that define who we are as individuals. 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.

By now, even the reader is getting a bit exasperated by Delarue’s behaviour, is he a coward or a pretentious buffoon? He certainly has scruples, you can’t argue against that.Instead, he visits his mistress of seven years, Marcelle, who lives with her elderly mother. This lady, with her “masculine hands”, greets him with an affable, “Are you all right, old boy?” and their pained relationship becomes apparent from the off. He jabbed the knife into his palm and felt almost nothing. When he took his hand away, the knife remained embedded in his flesh, straight up, with its haft in the air. It also becomes apparent Ivich is somehow studying the wrong course (presumably due to parental interference) as Mathieu observes her inability to be a doctor of any sort – a dissection would “revolt” here. However, she and, indeed, her brother are kept in this circle of grownups seemingly as Delarue, Boris’ much older girlfriend (a local Parisian singer) Lola, and various others view them as a reminder of how they were a decade earlier. The dichotomy of youthful hedonism and adulthood is expressed most obviously in this chapter. Subsequent novels in the Road to Freedom have little to do with this theme, but what Sartre did is lay bare the concerns of his central characters whilst World War II loomed casually on the horizon.

This minor incident is important as Delarue is soon to be in considerable financial bother, but his tendency to throw his money away remains a consistent, rather inexplicable habit in the novel. Ivich was conscious of her youth, and so was Boris, but these were exceptions. Martyrs of youth. ‘I never knew I was young, nor did Brunet, nor did Daniel. We were only aware of it afterwards.’ He reflected without much pleasure that he was gong to take Ivich to the Gaugin exhibition. He liked to show her fine pictures, fine films, and fine things generally, because he was himself so unattractive; it was a form of self-excuse. 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. And yet he would not have liked to be good-looking – she was never more alone than when confronted with something to admire. And he said to himself: ‘I don’t know what I want from her.’While Mathieu is frantically trying to raise a loan to pay for Marcelle’s abortion, he simultaneously finds himself infatuated with a young student by the name of Ivich. Ivich’s charms are solely related to her youthfulness, and Mathieu’s attraction to her is depicted by Sartre as a distraction from Mathieu’s despair concerning his own age. Ivich hangs out at cafes and clubs, drinks irresponsibly and is sexually flirtatious with both men and women. In Ivich, Mathieu sees a kind of freedom; but it is the kind of freedom inappropriate for a man of his age and social position. In a pivotal scene at a nightclub called “Sumatra,” Mathieu and Ivich bond with one another – temporarily – when, after Ivich drunkenly slashes herself with a knife, Mathieu pins his own hand to a table with the same blade:

June 1938 – Evening. (The Age of Reason). Ivich has failed her examinations and Mathieu has failed to persuade her to stay in Paris. He has also just stolen money for an abortion and given it to Marcelle. After establishing that he would refrain from using extra-Biblical sources to inform his criticism, but would instead apply the Bible's own words against itself, Paine questions the sacredness of the Bible and analyzes it as one would any other book. For example, in his analysis of the Book of Proverbs he argues that its sayings are "inferior in keenness to the proverbs of the Spaniards, and not more wise and economical than those of the American Franklin." [29] [30] [31] Describing the Bible as "fabulous mythology," Paine questions whether or not it was revealed to its writers and doubts that the original writers can ever be known (for example, he dismisses the idea that Moses wrote the Pentateuch or that the Gospel's authors are known). He finds a reliable but pricey abortionist, but that just increases the time-pressure (the doctor is headed abroad shortly) -- and, of course, that desperate hunt for the money helps keep his mind off the real questions he should be facing, but which he doesn't seem very comfortable entertaining. As she’s Boris’ sister, at some point she’s been introduced to Mathieu who seems to fall for her due to her looks and youth, with the two sharing an odd relationship based on the professor teaching Ivich about high culture. The DilemmaJune 1938 – Evening. (The Age of Reason). Mathieu has not been able to borrow the money he needs. He has arranged to meet Ivich and Boris to hear Lola sing. Daniel visits Marcelle. For a philosophy professor, Mathieu doesn't do much philosophizing, beyond on a very basic level; indeed, there's very little sense of him as either teacher or philosopher at any point in the novel (and he certainly never appears in an actual classroom).

The story focuses on Mathieu, a philosophy professor in Paris, who is in the midst of an existential crisis. The central theme of the novel concerns his struggles as he tries to understand the significance and purpose of his life while growing older and confronting his own freedom to choose between alternative life paths. As the novel opens, Mathieu finds out that his girlfriend, Marcelle, is pregnant with his child. The rest of the novel is structured around his frantic attempts to raise the money for an abortion. Next up, Delarue visits his brother Jacques in a desperate bid to wrest money off him, but is almost humiliated (and, for the first time, shows considerable annoyance) by his brother’s savage indictment of his life. Chapter one begins the trilogy, with Mathieu walking down the Rue Vercingetorix before he’s stopped by a half-drunk man (presumably homeless) eager to fuel his drinking further.

Introduction

As he retrieves Boris’ letters, he also notes a large amount of francs that will easily cover Marcelle’s abortion—he doesn’t take the money. Walking out of the room, he stops in the hallway and notes: “What a feeble fool I am!” Working himself into a bit of a personal crisis, he eventually decides to return to the room to take the money, only to find Lola is awake: “Who’s that”, she asks. “The little idiot!”, Delarue thinks. Such impending disaster makes many innocuous day-to-day endeavours trivial, of course, but at this stage his creations are busying themselves worrying about ageing, money, and relationships. Analysis [ edit ] An oil painting of Thomas Paine by Auguste Millière (1880), after an engraving by William Sharp, after a portrait by George Romney (1792)