The Words (book)

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The Words (French: Les Mots) is the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre's 1963^[1] autobiography.

Structure and presentation

The text is divided into two near-equal parts entitled 'Reading' (Lire) and 'Writing' (Écrire). 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
  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.

The first title which Sartre thought of was Jean sans terre.^[2]

Reception

The book, consisting of Sartre distancing himself from writing and making his farewells to

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