Genre
Philosophical essay
Setting and Context
The first half of the 20th century
Narrator and Point of View
First person perspective from the author’s point of view
Tone and Mood
Sincere and logically argumentative
Protagonist and Antagonist
Protagonist: existentialism. Antagonists: critics of existentialism.
Major Conflict
The conflict is situated in the essay’s opening line: “My purpose here is to offer a defense of existentialism against several reproaches that have been laid against it.”
Climax
“This relation of transcendence as constitutive of man (not in the sense that God is transcendent, but in the sense of self-surpassing) with subjectivity (in such a sense that man is not shut up in himself but forever present in a human universe) – it is this that we call existential humanism.”
Foreshadowing
“Many may be surprised at the mention of humanism in this connection, but we shall try to see in what sense we understand it” foreshadows the climax quoted above.
Understatement
N/A
Allusions
“An angel commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son; and obedience was obligatory, if it really was an angel who had appeared and said, `Thou, Abraham, shalt sacrifice thy son” is an allusion to biblical scripture.
Imagery
“When we think of God as the creator, we are thinking of him, most of the time, as a supernal artisan… Thus, the conception of man in the mind of God is comparable to that of the paper-knife in the mind of the artisan: God makes man according to a procedure and a conception, exactly as the artisan manufactures a paper-knife, following a definition and a formula.”
Paradox
“Promote a rogue and he’ll sue you for damage, knock him down and he’ll do you homage” is offered as an example of paradoxically bad common wisdom alongside the more familiar “Charity begins at home” aphorism.
Parallelism
N/A
Metonymy and Synecdoche
“He is not like that on account of a cowardly heart or lungs or cerebrum” engages the common metonymic device to identifying body parts as metaphors for emotion and intellect.
Personification
N/A
