Love and Sexuality Theme Analysis

There are still about twenty customers left, bachelors, small-time engineers, office employees. They eat hurriedly in boarding-houses which they call their “popotes” and since they need a little luxury, they come here after their meals. They drink a cup of coffee and play poker dice; they make a little noise, an inconsistent noise which doesn’t bother me. In order to exist, they must consort with others.

I am alone, entirely alone. I never speak to anyone, never; I receive nothing, I give nothing.

It was Sunday; massed between the balustrade and the gates of residents’ chalets, the crowd dispersed slowly… […] these people were neither sad nor gay: they were at rest. Their wide-open, staring eyes passively reflected sea and sky. […] I didn’t know what to do with my hard, vigorous body in the midst of this tragic, relaxed crowd. […] The light grows softer. At this uncertain hour one felt evening drawing in. Sunday was already past. […] For a moment I wondered if I were not going to love humanity. But, after all, it was their Sunday, not mine.

I dined at the Rendezvous des Cheminots. The patronne was there and I had to kiss her, but it was mainly out of politeness. […] I played distractedly with her sex under the cover; then my arm went to sleep. […] I let my arm run along the woman’s thigh, and suddenly saw a small garden with low, wide trees on which immense hairy leaves were hanging. Ants were running everywhere, centipedes and ringworm. There were even more horrible animals: their bodies were made from a slice of toast, the kind you put under roast pigeons; they walked sideways with legs like a crab. The larger leaves were black with beasts. Behind the cactus and the Barbary fig trees, the Velleda of the public park pointed a finger at her sex. “This park smells of vomit,” I shouted.

Soft glow: people are in their houses, they have undoubtedly turned on the lights too. They read, they watch the sky from their window. For them it means something different. They have aged differently. They live in the midst of legacies, gifts, each piece of furniture holds a memory. Clocks, medallions, portraits, shells, paperweights, screens, shawls. They have closets full of bottles, stuffs, old clothes, newspapers; they have kept everything. The past is a landlord’s luxury.

Where shall I keep mine? You don’t put your past in your pocket; you have to have a house. I have only my body: a man entirely alone, with his lonely body, cannot indulge in memories; they pass through him. I shouldn’t complain: all I wanted was to be free.

I suddenly understood: the cloak! I wanted to stop it. It would have been enough to cough or open the gate. But in my turn I was fascinated by the little girl’s face. Her features were drawn with fear and her heart must have been beating horribly: yet I could also read something powerful and wicked on that rat-like face. It was not curiosity but rather a sort of assured expectation. I felt impotent: I was outside, on the edge of the park, on the edge of their little drama: but they were riveted one to the other by the obscure power of their desires, they made a pair together.

Then I realized what separated us: what I thought about him could not reach him; it was psychology, the kind they write about in books. But his judgment went through me like a sword and questioned my very right to exist. And it was true, I had always realized it; I hadn’t the right to exist. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant or a microbe. […]

But for this handsome, faultless man, now dead, for Jean Pacôme, son of the Pacôme of the Défence Nationale, it had been an entirely different matter: the beating of his heart and the mute rumblings of his organs, in his case, assumed the form of rights to be instantly obeyed. For sixty years, without a halt, he had used his right to live. […] He had always done his duty…

Little Lucienne was raped. Strangled. Her body still exists, her flesh bleeding. She no longer exists. […] I am. I am. I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I don’t want to think any more, I am because I think that I don’t want to be, I think that I… because… ugh! I flee. The criminal has fled, the violated body. She felt this other flesh pushing into her own. I… there I… Raped. A soft, criminal desire to rape catches me from behind, gently behind the ears, the ears race behind me, the red hair, it is red on my head, the wet grass, red grass, is it still I? Hold the paper, existence against existence, things exist one against the other.

He runs, the heart, the heart beats, it’s a holiday, the heart exists, the legs exist, the breath exists, they exist running, breathing, beating, all soft, all gently breathless, leaving me breathless, he says he’s breathless; existence takes my thoughts from behind and gently expands them from behind; someone takes me from behind, they force me to think from behind, therefore to be something, behind me, breathing in light bubbles of existence, he is a bubble of fog and desire, he is pale as death in the glass, Rollebon is dead, Antoine Roquentin is not dead, I’m fainting: he says he would like to faint, he runs, he runs like a ferret, “from behind” from behind from behind, little Lucienne assaulted from behind, violated by existence from behind, he begs for mercy, he is ashamed of begging for mercy, pity, help, help therefore I exist…

I don’t need to turn around to know they are watching me through the windows: they are watching my back with surprise and disgust; they thought I was like them, that I was a man, and I deceived them. I suddenly lost the appearance of a man and they saw a crab running backwards out of this human room. Now the unmasked intruder has fled: the show goes on.

[The Self-Taught Man] must be walking at random, filled with shame and horror—this poor humanist whom men don’t want. To tell the truth, I was hardly surprised when the thing happened: for a long time I had thought that his soft, timid face would bring scandal on itself. He was so little guilty: his humble, contemplative love for young boys is hardly sensuality—rather a form of humanity. But one day he had to find himself alone. Like M. Achille, like me: he is one of my race, he has good will. Now he has entered into solitude—forever.