Mauriac also doubted that justice would be impartial or dispassionate given the emotional turmoil of liberation. Camus said newly liberated France should purge all Nazi collaborator elements, but Mauriac warned that such disputes should be set aside in the interests of national reconciliation. At that time, Camus edited the resistance paper Combat (thereafter an overt daily, until 1947) while Mauriac wrote a column for Le Figaro. Mauriac had a bitter dispute with Albert Camus immediately following the liberation of France in World War II. On 1 June 1933 he was elected a member of the Académie française, succeeding Eugène Brieux. He studied literature at the University of Bordeaux, graduating in 1905, after which he moved to Paris to prepare for postgraduate study at the École des Chartes. He is currently an FCT post-doctoral research Fellow at the University of Porto (Portugal), where he is developing a research project on self-knowledge in collaboration with the Mind Language and Action Group (MLAG), and an adjunct fellow at the University of Western Sydney (Australia).François Charles Mauriac was born in Bordeaux, France. Pierre-Jean Renaudie defended a PhD devoted to the relations between language and perception in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology at the University Paris-Sorbonne (France). I will argue that this connection between Sartre’s philosophical claims and his theory of the novel does not only justify his literary options, but sheds some interesting light on his philosophy of mind. The purpose of this paper is to interrogate the philosophical roots of Sartre’s theory of the use of the third-person in literature, and to understand why the opacity of selfconsciousness, even though compromising self-knowledge, is not only ineluctable but necessary to human freedom.

This important text puts forward an original conception of literary realism that argues against the omniscience of the narrator for the sake of a faithful account of the experience of freedom and description of conscious life. In 1939, Sartre writes a critical essay on François Mauriac’s novel La fin de la nuit in which he develops an interesting theory of the literary use of the first and third person pronouns that stigmatises the ambiguities resulting from Mauriac’s use of the third person.

La fin de la nuit françois mauriac