A musketeer
The author revels a lot of images of his childhood. He describes his impressions of the read books and vividly portrays situations when he put on himself the traits of the characters he admired. When all the members of the family were busy he “would slip into the study; it was already dark there; two candles were burning on the piano. I would seize my grandfather’s ruler; it was my rapier; his paper-cutter was my dagger; I became then and there the flat image of a musketeer”. As every child Sartre was impressive and he needed somebody to take an example after. As he was fatherless such examples became the characters from the novels.
Settings
Referring to his childhood attempts at writing, Sartre mentions that settings and atmosphere played a very important role for his imagination. Thus, when writing something terrible with elements of supernatural Sartre needed as he called himself “an occasion” – “nightfall, the dining-room would be bathed in shadow. I would push my little desk against the window, the anguish would stop creeping me again”. These details help to understand the writer better. For him his writings were something more that just putting in something created in the mind. Emotions described were to be real, he had put them through himself to make them realistic and true.
Cinematograph
Movies and cinemas were just entering the life of people at the beginning of the 20th century, and the young Sartre, on the pages of The Words realizes this as something new - a new kind of art. The kind of art that he himself did not perceive as art, but only as entertainment. Cinematography, the aesthetics of cinemas, as the author puts is "the art of the crowd", all this amazed Sartre and took a special place on the pages of the story. As the author says: “The future existed; the movies had revealed it to me”.
