sassins [Les Justes] and State of Siege (1948), and Sartre's reworking of Greek tragedy in The Flies (1943). Three of these works are more or less realistic in approach. Both of Malraux's novels and Camus' Just Assassins have real-world settings. Malraux's books take place during the Chinese Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, while Camus' assassins are nineteenth-century Russians struggling against tsarist tyranny. The others make no pretense of naturalism. State of Siege is "a morality play in modern dress" with characters who are "dramatized attitudes and intellectual positions" (Sprintzen 106). And Sartre's play imitates the setting and other characteristics of Athenian tragedy--including the participation of divine beings
All these works were the result of their authors' engagement in the particular struggles to which they refer. Malraux's Conquerors reflects his involvement in anticolonialist struggles in the Far East. The character of Gerard is an activist in the Indochinese Kuomintang, "a situation not greatly different from Malraux's" work with the subversive Indochine EnchaenTe (Greenlee 37). Man's Hope was also a product of Malraux's involvement in war. He arrived in Spain almost immediately and, after filling a number of functions there, rushed the very long novel into print as part of his effort "to create sympathy for the Spanish Loyalist cause" (Greenlee 102). Sartre's The Flies was his second attempt at drama. The play Bariona (1942), which drew on the Christian nativity story, had been performed by Sartre's fellow prisoners in Stalag XII in Treves. In that case the play was a "call to resistance" that was allowed by their captors who were misled by the setting--even to the point of ignoring Bariona's call to "his fellow Judeans to oppose the oppression of the Roman occupation" (Kellman 169). The Flies eluded censorship in a similar manner as its "call to revolt against Nazi occupation" was disguised ...