While, in the early years, Sartre hesitated between dedicating himself to philosophy or literature, he became both a philosopher and a literary author. When studying in Berlin in 1933, his writing routine was in the morning to read Husserl and to work on The Transcendence of the Ego, and in the late afternoon to work on the novel Nausea. The Transcendence of the Ego was published in 1934. The Imaginary, a phenomenological investigation into the imagination, was published in 1936 and his Theory of Emotions in 1938. In the same year he published his first philosophically inspired novel, Nausea. These texts brought Sartre early recognition. A year earlier he had already published a bundle of collected stories entitled The Wall. In the postwar period, Sartre’s novels, stories, and plays were very popular with the reading public. They reflected the existential sensibility of the times and prompted people to wonder about the meaning of human existence: Are we truly condemned to freedom? Is there any meaning outside of what we make of life? Is it possible to love and be loved? How to make sense of the absurdity of life? Sartre’s fictional writings and plays can indeed be seen to exemplify the phenomenological intuitions that are elaborated in his philosophical works (see Cox, 2009). Sartre’s famous phrase “being what I am not” expresses well the nature of the for-itself and consciousness: it is what it is not, and is not what it is. Translated it means that the human being is consciousness and not simply a being that is (like a thing). Properly speaking, Dasein (the human existent) has no essence, except insofar as we may sometimes feel that we are who we are and we cannot really change ourselves. Again, this kind of existence Sartre calls “bad faith” or deceiving oneself. A person who acts in bad faith denies his or her freedom and tries to escape from the condition that we are indeed condemned to freedom. Even refusing to make a choice is really to make the choice not to choose. For Sartre to identify oneself as someone who is forgetful or who doesn’t like books or as someone who is thrifty are instances of bad faith and a denial of personal freedom. To assume a certain identity is to behave as if one is an in-itself—a thing that is what it is.
From a methodological perspective, it is instructive to observe how Sartre makes use of fictional examples at two levels or in two variations: through his novels and through the many fictional anecdotes in his phenomenological and philosophical explications and essays. For example, in his novel Nausea, Sartre describes a moment when the protagonist, Roquentin, is overcome by the unsettling enigma of the thingness of the thing: “I lean my hand on the seat but pull it back hurriedly: it exists. This thing I’m sitting on, leaning my hand on, is called a seat . . . . I murmur: ‘It’s a seat,’ a little like an exorcism. But the word stays on my lips: it refuses to go and put itself on the thing. It stays what it is . . . . Things are divorced from their names. They are there, grotesque, headstrong, gigantic and it seems ridiculous to call them seats or say anything at all about them: I am in the midst of things, nameless things. Alone, without words, defenceless, they surround me, are beneath me. They demand nothing, they don’t impose themselves: they are there” (Sartre, 2007, p. 125).