Since we'll be reading an excerpt from the end of Simone de Beauvoir's World War II novel The Blood of Others, I thought I'd give you some background information about the story and characters. (Check back for the study questions--they should be up in the next day or so.)
The novel begins with a quote from Fyodor Dostoyevsky: "Each of us is responsible for everything and to every human being." In the opening scene, we find out that a young woman named Helene has been seriously wounded while participating in a Resistance bombing mission against the Nazis. She is sleeping, but there is little hope that she will survive the night. In the next room, her friends and fellow Resistance fighters discuss plans to complete their mission the next day. Among them is her ex-lover, Jean Blomart, who has volunteered to take over the job that Helene failed to complete: to personally set the time-bomb.
As Helene sleeps and Jean waits for daybreak, he reflects back on the events that have lead up to this night. The majority of the novel is narrated from Jean's point of view, as he remembers his childhood, his break from his family, the beginnings of his relationship with Helene, the onset of the war, and their first activities in the French Resistance.
Although most of the novel is presented from the perspective of these past events, the narrator occasionally breaks into the story in order to comment, as he sits at Helene's deathbed, on his memories of these past events. This can be a little confusing, so just note that whenever you see a passage of narration that's completely italicized, it represents Jean's thoughts in the present time (on the night of Helene's death).
The character of Jean Blomart is loosely based on Jean-Paul Sartre. He is a young man from an upper middle-class background who has cut off ties from his family, abandoning a possible career as future owner of his father's printing company in order to become a laborer and union-leader. He's an active agitator for the political left, but refuses to join the Communist party out of a desire to preserve his intellectual independence--and out of an unwillingness to impose, through revolutionary action, his own values on others.
When Jean first meets Helene, she is free-spirited, selfishly individualistic, and a bit childish. She eventually falls deeply in love with him, but Jean doesn't feel the same way toward her. He initially tries to end their friendship to avoid hurting her, but it doesn't work--she only grows more attached to him. Jean's most striking personality trait is his commitment to the value of freedom--both his own and others--so it pains him to realize that he is involuntarily imposing emotional suffering on Helene. He eventually decides to lie and tell her he loves her in order to end her suffering. Despite this, he does truly care for her, and they have a reasonably happy relationship until the approaching war forces them to choose between personal happiness and social responsibility.
Beauvoir presents Jean's decision to pretend he loves Helene as a kind of bad faith: he's trying to avoid realizing the consequences his own freedom must have upon others. Throughout the novel Jean is plagued by guilt over his role in Helene's fate. He feels he is indirectly her murderer, since she would never have joined the Resistance without his influence.
Helene, on the contrary, exhibits a different form of bad faith. We learn that she had a devoutly religious upbringing, and Beauvoir's characterization suggests that in her love for Jean, Helene has tried to overcome the loss of security and authority that she once found in religion. Helene devotes herself to Jean so that she can avoid the anguish of taking up her own freedom.
Not only that, Helene's love seems selfish. When France enters the war against Germany, she is completely unwilling to accept Jean's decision to join the fight. By refusing to think about how her own happiness and peace of mind might come at others' expense, Helene denies that her choices are made on behalf of others as well as herself, thus ignoring any responsibility she may have to others.
Our selection from the novel begins with Jean's return from the front lines to Paris. Helene has used a powerful family connection to get Jean restationed, against his will, in Paris--far from the danger of combat. Jean is very upset, and feels he's betraying his friends who are risking their lives at the front...
