When we left Mathieu in the previous novel, The Reprieve, he had decided against committing suicide and was heading off to the war. As his story begins in this book, he is waiting with a bunch of bored soldiers on a farm; they have not been called on to fight and are waiting for the armistice so they can go back to doing something, anything, with their lives other than loitering. They move on to a farming village and Mathieu struggles to fit in with them. His profession as an educator sets him apart; he has a sense of higher purpose in life even though he really has no idea what that means but they, on the other hand, care mostly about getting blind drunk and talking about their genitals. When they receive word that France has surrendered to Germany and the invading troops are coming to seize the village, Mathieu and another soldier decide to fight.
This is a big turning point in his life. For the first time he decides to take action rather than allowing his life to just happen. Mathieu and the other man meet up with four soldiers from another battalion and they go up to the top of a church tower to shoot at the Germans as they arrive. Mathieu takes delight in killing the soldiers and every time he shoots at one he thinks about something that has gone wrong in life. At that moment he becomes transformed from a mild-mannered intellectual into a psychopathic killer. But in the act of killing Germans he frees himself from his past. He does not die a hero’s death because France has lost the war and the Germans have seized the town but he wants to take some sort of action that will create his freedom, even if the ultimate freedom means his own death.
After that, the story of Brunet takes over. Brunet is a dedicated member of the Communist Party. Before the war, he wrote ideological propaganda articles for a newspaper. In Troubled Sleep he is imprisoned in a Nazi prisoner of war camp. He strikes up an awkward friendship with an intellectual soldier named Schneider. Brunet sees himself as being on a mission and starts building a clandestine cell of communist prisoners. Like other characters in the Roads to Freedom trilogy, Brunet is too close to himself to see himself clearly and this is where Schneider comes into the narrative. Schneider wonders why Brunet wants to build his cell when he is so cut off from the Communist Party itself. Stalin, the Comintern, the Politburo, and the locals in the French party do not know where he is and are probably too busy to care. But Brunet realizes that he has to do something while imprisoned. He can not let his life go to waste even if his actions are ultimately inconsequential. He is like a priest who builds a church to honor God even though he knows in his heart that God does not exist; he needs something to do with his time and it does not really matter what it is as long as he does it well.
The narratives of Mathieu and Brunet are the strongest parts of the novel. The other narratives that restart the stories of characters from the previous books do not deliver quite as well. Mathieu’s friend Gomez, a general from the Spanish Civil War, has escaped to New York City where he gets employed as an art critic. His abandoned wife Sarah and their son Pedro have to flee Paris on foot as the German troops begin to arrive. Ivich has gotten married and lives unhappily with her inlaws while her brother Boris can not decide if he should stay and marry Lola or take off for England to continue fighting the Nazis. All of these stories start and end without going very far or saying very much. Sartre probably intended to finish them in the fourth book of Raods to Freedom but he never got around to writing it.
The story of Mathieu’s friend Daniel gets restarted and continues on a little more successfully. In all his hatred, he wanders around an abandoned Paris, happy the Nazis have shown up to destroy the society that he dislikes so strongly. He sees Philippe, the upper-class pacifist from The Reprieve, trying to commit suicide by jumping into the Seine. Daniel prevents him and takes him back to his apartment to seduce him. He wants to build Philippe up for the purpose of tearing him down. This passage is psychologically intense and complex but does not reach its full potential because it too is incomplete. We never find out what happens between these two men. (Incidentally, this is written to completion as a short story in Jean-Paul Sartre’s collection The Wall).
Troubled Sleep is a mixed bag. The completed stories are brilliant while the incomplete ones are rather pointless and read as if Sartre was getting tired and running out of ideas. There is also less philosophy involved. We know that all the characters are searching for freedom in one way or another and their actions show how they pursue those paths but we do not actually learn a whole lot about them that we did not already know. If you have read the first two books of the trilogy, it is worth reading to get a sense as to where this is all going but it really is the weakest of the three novels. Sartre’s writing here is still good though, even when it does not reach its full potential.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Troubled Sleep. Bantam Books, New York: 1968.
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