Reading Himself and Others: Roth's Why Write? and Sartre's "Why Write?"

Abstract:What might readers infer from the identical titles and related concerns of Sartre's "Pourquoi écrire?" ("Why Write?") and Roth's Why Write?, his collected nonfiction, 1960-2013? Some of the concerns of that volume appear to link the more pervasive synthesis of nothingness and possibility in Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943) to Arthur Koestler's advocacy, in Insight and Outlook (1949), of "bisociative" cognition. At stake, for Roth, when reading himself and others, are incisive rejoinders to "insensate readers" who, ignoring the difference between personal identity and imaginative excursion, surrender personal responsibility while denigrating artistic prowess.