The Wall and the Changing Perception of Death in Confinement

Abstract

The short story The Wall by Jean-Paul Sartre complicates and changes the perception of mortality as the reader peers into the futility of life from the vantage point of the main character. Pablo Ibbieta, in what is likely to be his last night on earth, wades through the little hours left of his existence, pondering the beginning of death within life. The Sartrean notion around essence and how it precedes existence is central to the plot, in addition to how the soul is imprisoned by the body, which has its mental faculties degraded in an ever-tightening spatiality. This paper discusses, through key events of the narrative and the articulations around them, how the mind comes to perceive death in a space of incarceration, the creation of a dualistic reality in that situation and death as the great equalizer. What begins to emerge is the concept around the theatricality of life, with the reader gleaning with more immediacy the meaning of moral consequences and what the narrator must likely do as far as either accepting his present being or liberating himself from it.