Sartrian Nothingness: Roth’s The Ghost Writer, The Anatomy Lesson, Zuckerman Unbound, The Prague Orgy, and Exit Ghost

Key elements of Nathan Zuckerman’s imagination and psychological anguish are occasioned by l’être pour soi (“Being for-itself”) in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (L’être et le néant, 1943). Sartrian “nothingness” clarifies vital aspects of Zuckerman’s untraceable pain and writer’s block in The Anatomy Lesson (1983) and Zuckerman’s imaginative flight from bodily woe in Exit Ghost (2007). At the same time Sartrian nothingness frames issues related to freedom and creativity in The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), and, in a critique of Communist suppression of the arts, The Prague Orgy (an epilogue). These Zuckerman narratives explore “personal liberty” within core Sartrian contexts that pre-date Sartre’s conversion to Marxism and—as as apprehended by Zuckerman in the context of Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia—that prove irreconcilable with Sartre’s Marxist alignment.