Abstract

Like many other writers of his generation, the Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa was influenced by the French existentialist movement. This dissertation analizes the presence of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in the work of Vargas Llosa. ;The first chapter describes the trajectory of Sartre's influence on Vargas Llosa through the examination of the Peruvian author's articles written between 1962 and 1990, his literary essays Garcia Marquez: Historia de un deicidio and La orgia perpetua: Flaubert y "Madame Bovary" , and his memoir El pez en el agua . ;The second chapter examines the writer as a fictional character in Vargas Llosa's novels and dramatic works in the context of Sartre's philosophy and theory of commitment in literature. In the first section, Sartre's concepts of bad faith and authenticity are applied to the analysis of Alberto Fernandez in La ciudad y los perros , Carlitos in Conversacion en La Catedral , and Varguitas in La tia Julia y el escribidor . In the second section, Sartre's theory on the imagination is shown to comprise elements in Vargas Llosa's own literary theory, and in the following characters: Pedro Camacho in La tia Julia y el escribidor, Belisario in La senorita de Tacna , and Saul Zuratas in El hablador . The third section discusses the problem of the committed writer in La guerra del fin del mundo , Historia de Mayta , and El hablador. Finally, in the last section the character Santiago Zavala, the failed writer from Kathie y el hipopotamo , illustrates a mixture of the concepts discussed in the previous sections. ;The third chapter examines the intellectual as a fictional character in Vargas Llosa's narrative. Inspired by Sartre's criticism of European intellectuals in his essay "Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels," Vargas Llosa criticizes Latin American intellectuals in his essay "El intelectual barato," in El pez en el agua, and in the narrative works, Conversacion en La Catedral, Historia de Mayta and La guerra del fin del mundo. ;Chapter four treats the influence of Albert Camus on Vargas Llosa's political ideas and in his narrative. Vargas Llosa's ethical evolution from Sartre's radicalism to Camus' moralism is presented through the study of the figure of the political revolutionary in Conversacion en la Catedral, Historia de Mayta, and Lituma en los Andes