The Sorrows of Young Jude - Sartre’s Concept of Freedom in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life

Abstract: Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life (2015) is about Jude St Francis, a successful lawyer whose inability to recover from his traumatic childhood causes him to commit suicide. This essay investigates why Jude is able to control and alter certain aspects of his life, but how he still is ultimately and finally dominated by his emotional trauma. By applying the theory on freedom in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943), as well as comparing it to other essays with corresponding theory and focus, this essay examines where the depiction of Jude coincides with Sartre’s idea of transcendent freedom, and where it does not. It draws the conclusion that Yanagihara depicts the effects of psychological trauma as something impossible to transcend, and hence the portayal of Jude ultimately suggests a deterministic rather than a Sartrerean philosophical outlook on existence.