In the essay below, Green asserts that "the Spanish setting of 'Le Mur' serves as a pretext for the evocation of more universal philosophical problems."

If Drieu uses the war in Spain as an appropriate denouement for his character's life and as a vantage point from which to analyze the European political situation, Jean-Paul Sartre uses it to illustrate the metaphysical absurdity of the human condition. The first written and the first published (in the Nouvelle Revue Francaise of July 1937) of the three works discussed in this chapter, "Le Mur" nevertheless reveals a more pessimistic outlook about life and politics than the work of either Malraux or Drieu. Sartre had uncannily anticipated the sense of despair that was to attack all of these writers by the end of the decade. In "Le Mur," in opposition to L'Espoir, the reality of the Spanish Civil War does not play...