Is The Ending Of The Wall By Jean Paul Sartre Ironic?

In "The Wall," Jean-Paul Sartre uses many literary techniques to convey irony. Jean-Paul Sartre, an existentialistic writer, states through his characters and symbolism that life has no value. Through Pablo's decision to "trade' his life, Sartre furthers the irony in the story. Symbolism provides authors with a way to convey an underlying theme or to portray the meaning in an event without explicitly outlining the incident. Sartre employs the symbol of a graveyard to express meaninglessness and nothingness. Emotions can express more than a character's feeling at a particular moment, they can also set a tone for a whole story. The conclusion of laughter brings another example of irony through its contradictory nature to the tone at the end of the story. Pablo's decision to trade his life, Sartre's symbolism of the graveyard, and the laughter that closes the story, fortify the ironic nature of this story.

Pablo begins to have an out of body experience to help him understand what is going on and what may happen to him.

In the state I was in, if someone had come and told me I could go home quietly, that they would leave my life whole, it would have left me cold: several hours or several years of waiting is all the same when you have lost the illusion of being eternal. I clung to nothing, in a way I was calm. But it was a horrible calm - because of my body; my body I saw with its eyes, I heard with its ears, but it was no longer me, it sweated and trembled by itself and I didn't recognize it anymore (239).

This convinces him that no matter what he does, whether he betrays Ramon Gris or not, he will die. He begins to question his behavior. Why would he sacrifice himself for Ramon Gris? Pablo realizes that no life has more value than another. "No life has value" (242). In the end, he concludes that life has no meaning anyway and that it will not make a difference if he lies to the inquisitors or tells them the truth. His trade becomes ironic when his exchange becomes futile. Ramon Gris dies because Pablo decides to save him instead of himself. Pablo eventually deduces that he will never understand why one man lives and another dies. It is a mystery that he will never solve. Death now seems meaningless because he has become uninterested in life. He had wrestled with the idea of death all night, sweating, turning grey, pissing himself, only to finally realize that since life has no meaning, death has no meaning and any effort that he might make from the moment he exchanges his life will be ineffectual.

Pablo does not believe that Ramon Gris is hiding in the graveyard, but pretends to concede to the Facists that he believes that Gris can be found "in a vault or a gravedigger's shack (243)". Sartre applies the graveyard to symbolize non-existence. Sartre was an existentialist: questioning why we exist and denying the existence of God. This belief dictates that there is nothing after death and that everything about our being disintegrates into oblivion when we die, our thoughts and emotions fades away into the abyss so we have no thoughts when we die. The inquisitors prey upon thoughts by using mental torture and threats of death to get people to question if their life has any meaning in this world. They care nothing about truth or a person's innocence. Juan is innocent yet he is sentenced to death anyway. Pablo sends the Fascists into a graveyard, a place that lacks thought or rationale. This makes sense because a graveyard is a place of non-existence and these inquisitors want their "victims" to believe they do not exist. Pablo sends them away out of spite "thinking about the spectacle they would make" and he can see them "lifting up tombstones, opening the doors of the vaults one by one." However, in the end Pablo succumbs to exactly what the Fascists wanted, he sinks into a non-existent state in which his body is animated yet his essence has departed alive yet he does not