French literature summaries - 2021

Short summary - The Flies - Les Mouches
Jean-Paul Sartre

The sun stood still over Argos, but no warmth reached its people. The air was heavy with guilt, and the very sky seemed stained with sorrow. Flies buzzed thick over the city like a black cloud — no ordinary flies, but grotesque, vengeful things, born from the rot of past sins. They feasted on corpses and memories alike. In Argos, remorse had become a religion, fear its priest, and the dead its gods.

Into this stifling city came a young man — Orestes. Tall, proud, yet thoughtful, he had wandered far from home, raised in foreign lands, where no one knew the cursed name of Agamemnon. But now, fifteen years after his father’s murder, he returned to his birthplace, disguised, accompanied only by a sly tutor named The Pedagogue. He wore a mask of curiosity, but deep inside, Orestes was stirred by something deeper — not grief, not duty, but an unnameable itch for truth, for action, for meaning.

In Argos, the people moved like ghosts, eyes cast downward, muttering prayers for forgiveness to the dead. The king who now ruled them, Aegisthus — the usurper, the murderer — strutted with hollow confidence. He had seized Agamemnon’s throne and married Queen Clytemnestra, Orestes' mother. Yet he feared the people, feared the gods, feared whispers in the dark. So he forged a pact with a grim divinity: Jupiter — no longer the proud, almighty god of Olympus, but a sly manipulator who fed on guilt like a leech on blood.

Jupiter had taught Argos to love their chains. He’d filled the city with rituals of repentance, turned the people into mourners, forced them to relive Agamemnon’s murder each year in a macabre festival of grief. And the flies, the infernal flies, were his agents — swarming reminders of judgment, of sin, of eternal shame.

Into this spiritual swamp wandered Orestes and his tutor. At first, Orestes was amused by the charade — this pantomime of a city pretending at remorse. But soon, he saw the sickness. He met Electra, his sister, now grown into a bitter, angry woman, trapped in the palace, suffocating in her own memories. She recognized him not at once, but something in her stirred — a forgotten scent, a glint in his eye — and when at last she knew, the joy in her heart clashed with dread.

Electra was a prisoner not only of Aegisthus, but of despair. She dreamed of revenge, of liberating her father’s name, but she dared not act. She had learned to live with her hate, worn it like a second skin. But with Orestes, something changed. A possibility appeared — not just of vengeance, but of freedom.

The siblings stood at the heart of a philosophical storm. For Sartre did not write heroes with swords, but rebels with minds. Orestes was not just a prince — he was a consciousness awakening to itself. He came face to face with the truth: that the world was absurd, that the gods were manipulators, and that freedom was terrifying. To choose is to bear the weight of consequence. To act is to define oneself — and no god, no man, no law could do it for him.

Jupiter came to tempt him. He appeared not with thunderbolts, but with soft words and twisted logic. He offered Orestes a place in the system: repent, kneel, feel guilt, and you’ll be protected. But Orestes, the outsider, the stranger, laughed in the god’s face. He saw Jupiter’s trick: by keeping men guilty, the gods remain strong. But a man without guilt — a man who chooses freely — is more powerful than the gods.

And so Orestes made his decision.

He entered the palace on the night of the Festival of the Dead. Outside, the people wailed in the streets, dressed in black, reenacting the murder of Agamemnon with sick devotion. Inside, Orestes confronted Clytemnestra. The meeting between mother and son was no simple family drama — it was raw, primal, mythic. She tried to twist him, seduce him with memory, drown him in the milk of guilt. But Orestes had seen beyond illusion.

He killed her.

Then, sword still dripping, he turned on Aegisthus and struck him down too — not in blind rage, but in clear-eyed judgment. The deed was done. The curse fulfilled. The tyrants were dead.

But victory did not come with trumpets.

Electra, witnessing the carnage, was paralyzed. She had longed for revenge, but the reality was too sharp. She could not follow Orestes into this new world of freedom — it was too vast, too cold. She chose the cage she knew. She chose guilt, prayer, and mourning. Jupiter took her back into his fold, like a shepherd reclaiming a lost sheep.

Orestes stood alone.

The people, horrified, expected him to kneel, to beg forgiveness, to crumble under the weight of sin. But he did not. He faced the flies, the god, and the mob — and declared himself free. He claimed responsibility for his act, not with shame, but with dignity. “I am the man who did this,” he said. “I bear the weight, and I will it.”

And that is Sartre’s flame: in a world without meaning, we are condemned to be free. But in that condemnation lies our only chance at dignity. To choose, to act, to take responsibility — that is what it means to be human.

Orestes left the city, the flies buzzing behind him. He walked into exile, not as a fugitive, but as a man reborn — alone, but awake.

And so Orestes walked — not merely away from Argos, but out of the ancient myth that had bound him. He did not flee in shame or fear. No, he walked deliberately, each step echoing with the heavy silence of newfound freedom. Behind him, the city groaned under the weight of its own chains. The people cried out, not in mourning for Aegisthus or Clytemnestra, but for the comfort of their suffering, for the gods to cradle them once again in the lie of absolution. They looked to the skies, but the heavens offered no answer — only the black wings of the flies, whirling above the blood-soaked streets like an accusation written in the air.

Jupiter watched, cold and still, his omnipotence unraveling thread by thread. The god had gambled on guilt, on fear, on the docile spirit of mortals — but Orestes had torn that pact apart. Not by defying the law, but by accepting the full horror of liberty. That was the true blasphemy.

The city begged for justice, and the flies demanded atonement. Yet Orestes gave them neither. He had committed a double murder — and claimed it not as a crime, but as his act, a thing willed from the core of his being. In doing so, he stripped the gods of their power to punish. For what is divine wrath to a man who has embraced his own responsibility, who no longer seeks pardon?

Orestes had crossed a threshold that few dare even to glimpse. In Argos, people lived half-lives, crushed by inherited sins, trapped in rituals of eternal guilt. But in stepping outside that system, in casting off the chains of remorse, Orestes had declared: “I am the creator of my own values.” He had become, in Sartre’s language, existence choosing essence. A man, not a puppet. A flame, not a shadow.

Still, the cost was immense. He had no illusions of glory. He did not expect the people to follow him, nor Electra to stand at his side. That, perhaps, was the deepest wound. He had dreamed of setting her free — of waking her from her trance of suffering. But Electra had faltered. When she saw her mother’s blood on his hands, she recoiled not in horror at the act itself, but in terror of what it meant: that one could act — freely, without divine approval, without waiting for fate.

Her eyes had grown wide not with hatred, but with disbelief.

“Who gave you the right?” she had whispered.

“No one,” Orestes had replied.

And that was the point.

Jupiter, for all his ancient majesty, had shrunk in that moment. The god of Argos — once mighty, now exposed — had tried once more to seduce Orestes back into the fold.

“You are alone,” he warned. “You have no protection now. The world is cold, the burden endless. Come back. Confess. Repent.”

But Orestes only smiled — not defiantly, but calmly, with the weary certainty of a man who knows the weight of his choice. “I will carry my guilt,” he said. “But it is mine. It does not belong to you.”

In that moment, Jupiter’s defeat was sealed. For a god who rules through fear is powerless before one who fears nothing but his own conscience.

And still, the flies circled.

Not symbols now of divine wrath, but of the old world — the decaying world of inherited sin, of submission, of eyes turned always downward. They swarmed around Orestes, clinging, biting, desperate to bring him back into the dark. But he did not swat them away. He let them follow. He did not try to escape the consequences of his freedom — he invited them. That is the paradox Sartre carves into the flesh of this myth: that to be free is to suffer, but to suffer freely is to be free.

Thus Orestes becomes not a savior, not a hero in the old sense, but something starker, lonelier, and more profound — a symbol of man’s solitude in a godless world. A rebel not against tyranny alone, but against the comfort of tyranny. He rejects the warmth of submission, the illusion of divine justice, and instead embraces the raw, terrifying birthright of human consciousness: we are what we choose to become.

Back in Argos, Electra weeps. Not only for the mother she lost or the brother she could not follow — but for the part of herself that glimpsed freedom and turned away. She walks through the palace like a sleepwalker, clinging to the rituals, whispering prayers she no longer fully believes. She may become queen, or she may be cast aside, but either way, she remains shackled — by fear, by memory, by the flies.

The people, too, return to their wails and ashes. They cry for the dead, for their lost king, for the gods to forgive them. But Jupiter no longer listens. Even he must reckon with what has happened. A single man has shattered the spell. And though the city sleeps again, the dream has been broken. The flies will buzz louder now. The guilt will seem hollower.

For somewhere out there walks a man — alone, yes, but awake. His name is Orestes. He carries blood on his hands, but walks without chains. He knows no god watches him. And yet, he watches himself.

This is the existential cry Sartre leaves us with — the howl of a soul that has looked into the abyss, and instead of trembling, has said: I choose.

And so the road stretches endlessly before Orestes — not paved with prophecy, not guided by fate, but raw and open, like a blank page he must write with every step. Behind him lies Argos, sunk back into its habitual mourning, wrapped in the suffocating veil of its ceremonies. The bells toll, the robes are black, and the flies, oh, the flies! — they hang heavier than ever, as though trying to drown out the echo of one man’s freedom.

But even the buzzing cannot erase what has been done.

Orestes, walking into the vast silence, feels the eyes of the world lift from him. No more gods to watch, no more people to expect, no divine voice to answer. And in that void he hears, not terror, but a terrible clarity. It is the clarity of being born — not once, but for the second time. The first birth placed him in the world. The second gave him to himself.

He is no longer Agamemnon’s son. No longer the avenger, nor the prince. He is Orestes — the man who acted.

And this is where Sartre turns the myth inside out. Where once tragedy was a wheel turning endlessly, grinding generations beneath it, now it is a single figure who brings the wheel to a halt. Orestes does not believe in destiny. He believes in choice. And his choice has cracked open a world where no one — not even a god — can escape responsibility.

But if Orestes has chosen freedom, the question now burns: what will he do with it?

This is the cost of existential freedom — it is not just the liberty to act, but the burden to create meaning where none is given. The moment Orestes denied the gods, he denied absolutes. There is no higher court to appeal to, no eternal law to fall back on. His act has meaning only because he gives it meaning. And meaning, in Sartre’s world, is a flame that must be constantly fed.

In this, Orestes becomes a mirror for us all. Who among us has not longed for a god to tell us what to do? Who has not begged for a rule, a sign, a fate, anything to escape the crushing responsibility of deciding what kind of person we must be?

But Orestes refuses that refuge. And that refusal is his victory.

Still, his heart is not untouched. Though he walks with his head high, there is a weight in his chest — not regret, but loneliness. Electra’s absence haunts him. She, who might have been a fellow rebel, turned away at the threshold. Her fear was too deeply rooted, her thirst for revenge too bound up in self-pity. When the moment of freedom came, she could not bear its light. She chose the shadows instead.

And Jupiter? The god limps back to his altar, wounded not in body but in authority. The power of the gods was never in their thunder — it was in the belief of men. When mortals stop obeying, gods dissolve like smoke. Orestes has not slain Jupiter with a sword. He has done something far more dangerous: he has rendered him unnecessary.

That is Sartre’s quiet revolution — not to kill the divine with blasphemy, but to reveal its redundancy. In a world where man takes responsibility, gods become obsolete.

And yet, the flies still swarm Argos.

They are not divine anymore. They are psychological. They are the residue of centuries of guilt and fear, the buzzing voice in the back of the mind that says: “Kneel.” The citizens obey. They lower their heads, chant their dirges, cling to the corpse of order. Because that, too, is a choice. Sartre shows us that men will often choose slavery over freedom — not because they love chains, but because they fear the burden of choice.

Orestes bears this knowledge now. It clings to him like dust on his skin. But he will not return to wipe it away. He has crossed the Rubicon. He is condemned — not by gods or laws, but by the sheer weight of liberty. And in that condemnation, there is dignity.

He knows the path ahead is lonely. He may never find another soul who has chosen as he has. The world may call him a criminal, a madman, a god-slayer. It does not matter. For he has become the author of himself. The world he walks into is not given — it is built with every step he takes. He must invent his purpose, define his morality, bear his guilt without repentance.

This is not a happy ending. Sartre offers no comfort. But it is a beginning.

A beginning that terrifies — and liberates.

The curtain falls not with the silence of closure, but with the trembling hum of awakening. The flies still buzz in Argos. But far away, one man walks, blood on his hands, the stars above him, and no gods left to answer to.

He is not cursed.
He is not saved.
He is free.