The gaze of otherness: “Hell is other people”

Abstract

The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a series of short stories about the United States of America in the early 1945, when he worked as a correspondent in this country. These texts, in which he described the way of life in the North American country, were, some of them, relocated and republished in the collection Situations III. The main importance of this literary production is its definition as “narrative Viaticum” or “travel narrative”, a specific literary genre with its own methods. And among these forms, the most important is the otherness or the encounter with the other, be it a foreign culture or simply an unknown landscape. In this paper, I want to introduce an apparent paradox: what is the relationship of this issue in the work of an author whose most famous phrase is, exactly, “Hell is other people”.