Langoliers and Sartre
I just had a totally random epiphany I have to share. So, Stephen King's "The Langoliers"--I've never read it, but I know the premise and watched about ten minutes of it with my King fanatic brother. But I will bet you any amount of money that King got the idea from Sartre's Nausea.
In Nausea, there's a moment when the main character has an existential epiphany. He's looking at a tree and suddenly understands the nature of that tree: as it is now, in this exact moment, divorced from as it has been and as it will be. I wish I could find the exact passage, but he understands existence as a seperate thing from the words we use to describe and the functions we use to understand it. Part of this incredibly convuluted philosophical passage is a description of understanding the past as erased by the present--the past as a seperate object--and the future also as a seperate object.
Obscure, I know, and I'm dredging this up from a high school course on existentialism, but--sound familiar? That's the kernel of the idea of "The Langoliers." Being displaced into the past. But not in a time travel way, not the past as experienced when it was the present. The past as simply a space occupied by the objects that are now in the present. Which is damn Sartrian.
Add to that that the main character of Nausea has an obsession with shredding paper, as does a character in "The Langoliers."
Some Stephen King fan out there please tell me that he's said in some interview that Sartre was an influence.
In Nausea, there's a moment when the main character has an existential epiphany. He's looking at a tree and suddenly understands the nature of that tree: as it is now, in this exact moment, divorced from as it has been and as it will be. I wish I could find the exact passage, but he understands existence as a seperate thing from the words we use to describe and the functions we use to understand it. Part of this incredibly convuluted philosophical passage is a description of understanding the past as erased by the present--the past as a seperate object--and the future also as a seperate object.
Obscure, I know, and I'm dredging this up from a high school course on existentialism, but--sound familiar? That's the kernel of the idea of "The Langoliers." Being displaced into the past. But not in a time travel way, not the past as experienced when it was the present. The past as simply a space occupied by the objects that are now in the present. Which is damn Sartrian.
Add to that that the main character of Nausea has an obsession with shredding paper, as does a character in "The Langoliers."
Some Stephen King fan out there please tell me that he's said in some interview that Sartre was an influence.