| Abstract: | This article establishes that the suffering of the other represents a serious philosophical and ethical problem in Beauvoir's first post–World War II novel. In fact, the other's suffering poses such a complex problem in Le sang des autres particularly because Beauvoir depicts her characters’ world as a kind of Mitsein, which is Heidegger's word to describe how our lives necessarily intertwine with and envelop the lives of others while still allowing for the existential experience of separation. In the novel, the main characters’ potential responses to the other's suffering—quietism, indifference, charity, and empathy—fail according to the novel's existentialist ethical framework because of the ways these responses deny the fundamental ambiguity of Beauvoirian Mitsein. Only in accepting separation and connection as codependent ethical values do the characters find an ethically palatable response to the other's suffering at the end of the novel. |
