ABSTRACT
AS A NOVELIST, JEAN-PAUL SARTRE never separated fact from fiction, nor did he believe that a writer should. In his trilogy, Les Chernins de la liberié (The Roads to Freedom), each of his characters is based very closely on a person Sartre knew well in real life, often a person who had deeply affected him. On the theory that we can identify these people — and we can — and trace their own trajectory, often even interview them, we can not only use Sartre's novels as biographical data, we can also analyze Sartre's way of thinking by finding out what he changed, what he stressed, what he deliberately ignored, in sum, what he chose to write about and why. I will try to do that here with one such character/person, an example of Sartre's own regressive/progressive method which he used so well in L'ldiot de la famille.
