Sartre's 'The Room': Bad Faith and the Refusal to Choose

Jean-Paul Sartre's 1939 short story 'The Room' (La Chambre), part of the collection The Wall (Le Mur), explores existentialist themes of bad faith through the character Ève, who is married to Pierre, a man with severe mental health issues. Pierre lives in a dark room, painting everything black, and suffers from delusions such as believing his life is visible on a screen and that flying statues attack him. Ève refuses to send him to a psychiatric hospital and instead actively tries to believe his delusions are real, even though she cannot truly understand them. Sartre's concept of bad faith, elaborated in Being and Nothingness, involves denying one's freedom and responsibility by pretending to be a fixed role, like a waiter who acts as if he is merely a waiter rather than a free individual. Ève's bad faith lies in attempting to join Pierre's invented world to avoid making a real decision about his condition. At the story's end, Ève says she will kill Pierre before he becomes too ill, a statement that reveals her refusal to face the reality of her freedom and the responsibility of choosing. The story contrasts Pierre's complete detachment from reality with Ève's mother, Madame Darbédat, who is bedridden but still engages with the world through sensory pleasures and memories. Sartre uses the setting of stifling rooms and metaphorical walls to illustrate barriers to communication and comprehension, a theme also present in his plays No Exit and The Condemned of Altona.