Saint Genet is Sartre's account of the roles enacted, the metamorphoses undergone, by Genet himself. It is easier to indicate Sartre's aims in this huge volume than to describe his procedure. What we have is not a process of analysis, nor even the retracing of such a process, but its results: an exposition of the totality of Genet, arranged partly chronologically and partly according to certain topics. As before with Baudelaire, Sartre commences with origins—Genet's parentage and childhood environment—looking for the decisive choices made in youth, and showing how these shaped the adult, how they formed Genet's conception first of himself, then of art and artistic activity, and so in time came to dictate the particulars of literary expression. Like the essay on Baudelaire, that on Genet ends with a prolonged inspection of the published works themselves, in which these are seen as a final splendid...