It is quite possible that the event related in "The Wall" was an actual occurrence—a legend of the International Brigade that came to Sartre by word of mouth. If so, like a good many less sophisticated narrators of such haunting tales, he may have intended at first merely to show his readers how bravado and loose, irresponsible talk could lead inadvertently to a comrade's death. More profoundly, however, as a maturing existentialist facing Fascism and the oncoming World War, he needed to show that not to make the authentic decision is inevitably to make the unauthentic one.

This is always true, as a certain amount of honest self-examination will reveal to anyone; and it is true regardless of how the event turns out. It is likewise true that there is never any radical discontinuity between the moral quality of a decision and the moral quality...