What About Sartre and Hemingway's Characterization?

I wish I knew. If Hemingway's characters lived in a mobius strip twisted to resemble a world shaped like a pretzel they would just deal with it maybe with determination and compressed meaning, possibly even aware of the strangeness of it's shape. The characters would accept it as natural though. With short, intentional strides progress would be made. beyond a stream ford tent poles would go up, face paint come off and rifles reloaded. Perimeter guards might listen for the distant drone of an approaching plane or the hoot of an owl stalking the darkness.

Hemingway's Robert Jordan just dies meaninglessly at the end of For Whom the Bell Tolls getting shot trying to cross a road cut across a mountain slope. Nothing more than why did the chicken cross the road to it. In a way Hemingway is more existential than Sartre. In that sense of meaninglessness can the government ever fairly say that anything is an existential threat?

Sartre's characters would probably reflect a more about the nature and relationships of what they see and experience; even if they were about to die. They might die thinking otherwise as they disappeared into a mind whirlpool of toxic chocolate neuron connection dissolution.

The more reflective, existentially immersed character is more popular in some ways now than the Hemmingway guy-at least for some bureaucratic fiction and/or non-fiction writers. They may comment on existential threats importing Sartre's philosophical term of subjective rationalism into the vocabulary of political realism.

Osama Bin Laden was an existential terrorist in such a contextual lexicon. Reality intruding into political subjectivism is sometimes regarded as an existential invasion of collective personal space. We might prefer that objective, implicit terminology be used in government instead of making even the federal deficit a subjective cognitive experience.

Sartre's fiction characters such as in the Age of Reason or The Condemned of Altoona had at least a narrator to reflect upon the objectivity of the circumstance they found themselves in. In political existentialism one can be placed into circumstances not of one's choosing.

Sartre's characters always retained their ability to say no to a situation's demands for conformal behavior, yet of course they could lose their existence for doing so, or alternatively, they might have little room for choice (as when the condemned were waiting their turn to be taken to a firing squad and shot they could just say no to their fear about it).

Political and environmental circumstances that impose the will of others or of nature upon one's personal experience adversely become existential adversities for politicians only when the adversity is generated from a class rival. That brings us to awareness of the politically proprietary nature of the designation of existential adversary in contemporary non-fiction political narrative writing.

In my opinion Sartre would have placed politcally common social constructions with a Critique of Dialectical Reason context rather than that of existentialism. In Being and Nothingness existentialism is developed as a rational investigation of the subjective and objective nature of personal experience. It is a kind of ontology of mind. When used for a collective experience it tends to break down, or have its meaning replaced by a different meaning.

If existentialism is a subjective criterion, fiction writing and character development is not quite so much subjective. Characters are developed with objective words, terms and labels to provide a reason understandable to any reader for their actions. Even so we may like the philosophically minded character's objective view of his own circumstances as if it were subjective. The mob that has taken over the public square and become a revolutionary government is an exciting, swirling sea of humanity taking him along in the currents. Perhaps he will become a new political figure himself or become a destitute, starving and unpopular class outcast. It is exciting to consider the complete complex of compresent possibilities without too much effort as a subjective encounter in life.

Of course there are other points of view in the socially dialectical world of reason that we might visit with an omniscient narrator peering into the minds of the primary protagonists of our experience. Yet as non-omniscient citizens we might be limited to describing the social dialectic of political interaction as a phenomenality with causal mechanics in itself. Then we find our characterization of the commons and its events as personally existential still, yet for others and in-itself entirely other. The bureaucratic application of existentialism to mean 'existing things' annihilates the subjective element of existentialism and replaces it with the commons and its political lexicon. The sadistic nature of government expresses itself in the annihilation of the value or primacy of citizen subjectivity.

Not to say that government is invariably sadistic. It is only occasionally sadistic as it actualizes its collective otherness as a for-itself through wars, revolutions and setting of tax policy up and down. Then the lexicon of power becomes too familiar arising to negate individual privacy.

Making the commons a transcending lexical social reality for-itself may stimulate citizen efforts to keep the invasive government communications remote-beyond the border of decency implicitly a civil and human right. We find Sartre's characterization of his personal subjective experience in 'Being and Nothingness' quite a bit different from the description of the collective commons dialectical 'narrating' itself as a political agent in history for-itself.