Why Write by Jean Paul Sartre

Sartre is a French novelist, critic and above all exponent of existentialism. In “Why Write?" Sartre’s description of final goal of art is to recover this world by giving it to be seen as it is, but as if it had its own source in human freedom. Sartre holds the belief that the writer appeals to the reader and his freedom to collaborate in the production of his work.

In “Why Write"? Sartre is primarily interested in the transaction (business) between the writer and the reader. We do not produce the world, it is there but we make it reveal itself to come in to being / life. Art is a means of doing of “enclosing the universe within man”. Sartre asserts that both artist and reader withdraw from their emotions and thus manage to mix their emotion ‘free’.

The essay is more concentrated on the idea of the association of writing with reading. He views that we possess consciousness that reveals everything. “Being” has its existence because of our consciousness we give being to others. Otherwise, the world is completely a stranger to us; it is dead. Man is the means by which things are manifested. Things do not have their being until and unless we approach them. We act up on the object; we are the directors of being but not the producer. Everything that has existence as dead object is brought in to existence because of our consciousness. In other words, our consciousness awakens the dead world.

Writer writes to express his freedom and to exist. He does not express his personal emotion in his text and does not impart organicity and aesthetic value. Writer himself does not give life to the text. The text is full of dead letters before the reader approaches it. It is reader who gives being/ meaning/ life to the lifeless text. Author always writes for the sake of readers. Who discovers the book, as already existed. Writer, however, intentionally becomes objective and distort the reality to create art by creating gap. The readers, who impart their being/ consciousness in to the animated text, fill such gap. Writer gives birth to the dead text but reader gives life to it. Hence complete structure of the text is produced by the collaboration between the two. So, Sartre's theory is called to be “Reader Response Theory”. A reader exercises his generosity by reading and reveals the particular face of text.

Reader has to fulfill certain conditions while reading the text, like committedness, choice and responsibility. Reading is a pact of generosity between author and readers, each one trust the other, each one counts on the other. Nothing can force the author believe that his reader will use his freedom; nothing can force the reader to believe that the author has used this. Both of them make a free decision. When a reader opens a book he has responsibility to awaken the dead letters. So reader is a fatherly figure for the text. Reader should dedicate the gift of his whole personality; without doing this, good reading is not possible.

Writer is unable to read what he writes. Here, Sartre shows similarity with a shoemaker, who cannot wear the shoes he produces, similarly, a writer just writer to make others read not for himself, he forces and waits for the reader. The text is never under the control of author and if he tries to do so he is eventually biased because the writer never writes for himself, rather he appeals to reader's freedom to join with his creation. Author writes to reveal the freedom of reader, and reader reads to reveal the freedom of author. Art reveals the world and gives existence to it. To write is to disclose the world and to reveal the freedom of reader so, it is only the freedom who can write for freedom.

Satire, as an existentialist philosopher, regards human existence as alien, forlorn and forgotten, as the book unless a reader arouses the dead letters through his consciousness. Thus man himself is the writer of his own destiny.