The journey of a spoiled self From Pascal’s Pensées to Sartre’s Les Mots

Early on, Sartre adopted Pascal as an intellectual companion to guide him in his search for the self and subsequent examination of the inauthenticity of that self. Offering an approach that is at once intellectual, existential, and stylistic, Pascal is one of the major interlocutors of Les Mots; Sartre’s text contains duplicitous agreement with the great writer, a parodic integration of Pascalian fragments, and reverence for a “mystic” who discovered the tricks of the conscience.