Sartre’s What is Writing? and Nathan Zuckerman’s Existential “Situations” in I Married a Communist

Abstract: What are the broader implications of the recent disclosure that Roth’s Why Write? (2017) resonates with the concerns of Jean Paul Sartre’s “Pourquoi écrire?”, one of four essays Sartre published in Situations II : Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (1948)? The current study presents proof of Roth’s use of Bernard Frechtman’s 1949 translation of that volume, and also goes beyond Roth’s attraction to Sartre’s essay “Why Write?” to speculate about the Frechtman volume’s overall impact on Roth’s I Married a Communist (1998). Considered in the Marxist context of all four of the essays in What is Literature? , Roth’s novel implicitly takes Sartre to task for forsaking the non-materialistic, freedom-confirming underpinnings of creative writing implied in Being and Nothingness ( L’être et le néant , 1943) by the ever-creative possibilities of Dasein.