World War II Book Review: Term Paper

It is key to understanding the author's view of love and even her own status as a woman and as a thinker. Of course, the book can simply be read as a love story of infidelity and sexual liberty gone wrong in the face of an ever-changing political society in a state of national and European chaos. But the Mandarins de Beauvoir referred to were also the elite, the intellectual elites of Chinese society who held themselves above from the common peasants.

Thus, by calling her fellow Left Bank intellectuals 'Mandarins' De Beauvoir symbolically calls upon her fellow intellectuals to become part and parcel of the political fray, rather than wasting their energies with entangling personal alliances that can be just as dissipating as the betrayals of Vichy and the subsequent alliances that sapped the French nation of its own vital energies. She calls upon the intellectual Mandarins of French society not to form their own elite core of thinkers, but to unite with others who share their thoughts in a less complicated way than pure, cerebral existentialism and visceral sexual pleasures that are really of interest only to the personal lives of those who suffer their consequences.The author does not necessarily see international communism as the only a solution, for she possesses little confidence in the intellectual elite's ability to truly free the peasantry alone by schooling them in a dictatorial fashion in 'right thinking,' in a classical Leninist fashion. However, the novel provides a liberating insight into the French elite's superficial equating of the personal with the political, and an important reminder that exestentialism must be located in its historical context, as well as seen as an ideology of philosophical….....