Abstract

This dissertation represents a close examination of Jean-Paul Sartre's La Nausee and Walker Percy's The Moviegoer in the context of existential thought with regard to the temporal development of the Self. The novels are seen as creative investigations into the epistemological situation of a concrete existential Self in the world, not as romans a these that simply explicate a particular philosophy or idea. The novels represent the Self as a concrete being which owns a temporally ecstatic structure that continually projects it into an uncertain---and always cooperatively creative---future. The dissertation explores in particular how novels present the Self's relation to others and to otherness; the role of language in the Self's alienation from or sense of belonging to a community; and the fundamentally "futural" and cooperative function of fiction which ultimately guarantees a Self its being. ;The themes of reading and improvisational fiction are further developed by the very form of the novels, which invite the reader into a complex knot of reading/writing/authorship/editorship that mirrors the very paradox that the main characters of the novels must live out. Both novels provide their readers with the structure and the freedom necessary for an improvisational interpretation that can never resolve into a final meaning. Any reading of the novels remains "futural" and indeterminate to the same degree as the pro-ject of the Self remains so. ;The philosophical context for the temporal nature of the Self is Sartre's L'Etre et le Neant, and Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, Repetition, Sickness unto Death and Either/ Or. Chapter One elucidates the Sartre's and Kierkegaard's thought on the Self; Chapter Two examines La Nausee and Chapter Three examines The Moviegoer