Modern mitologism: the existentialist philosophy and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Orestes

Abstract

In the play “Les mouches”, written by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1943, the Greek hero Orestes serves as an illustration of an existentialist theory that expresses the notions of freedom and responsibility. This is because this philosophy defends the idea that what is at the basis of human existence is the free choice that each man makes for himself and his way of building himself, so that “freedom comes from the nothingness that compels man to be made, rather than just being” (SARTRE, 1970). Sartre uses the character of Orestes to represent this free “being,” who can choose what he wants to be and how to be, regardless of any religious, institutional or social convention; but who is, above all, responsible for his own freedom. This way, we seek to understand the role of Orestes’s character in the Sartrean play and the way in which the dialogue with the myth brings to the surface, symbolically, the context of the 1940 France and the existentialist philosophy.