Construction de l’identité d’écrivain – une étude sur Marin Preda et Jean-Paul Sartre

Abstract

The article aims at analysing the writer’s identity construction in Marin Preda’s Life as a Pray and Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Words novels. Both novels deal with the creation and crisis of the literary vocation. Life as a Pray narrates the writer’s literary debut, in quest for a personal literary identity: memories, portraits of contemporary writers, writings and the cultural and political climate of the early fifties; other episodes approach the dimensions of fictional literature, the narrator playing the part of a common character. The novel is structured by two fundamental elements: the father who guides the process of his son's moral upbringing and the books whose influence becomes crucial in shaping the intellectual conscience. Both
elements are required for the understanding of past experiences and the search for honest existential answers. The Words is an autobiographic novel that describes Sartre’s first years of life while living with his mother and grandparents. For Sartre, the literary act started from an innocent act of
imposture. He started writing in order to please his grandfather and thus discovered the passion of the confession, of the words, of reading and writing, the unstoppable drive which eventually lead him to become an illustrious writer.