les mots

Les Mots, Jean-Paul Sartre. 1963

The text is divided into two near-equal parts entitled 'Reading' and 'Writing'. However, according to Philippe Lejeune, these two parts are only a façade and are not relevant to the chronological progression of the work. He considers the text to instead be divided into five parts which he calls 'acts':

• The first act presents in chronological order the 'prehistory' of the child by giving his family origin.

• The second act evokes the different roles Sartre acted out in his seclusion to an imaginary world, enabled by his family.^[1]

• The third act tells of his conscious realization of his imposture, his contingency, his fear of death and his ugliness.

• The fourth act presents the development of a new imposture, in which Sartre took up multiple different postures of writing.

• The fifth act relates Sartre's delusion, which he considers the source of his dynamism, and contains the announcement of a second book which he did not complete before his death