The Impossibility of Being-Oneself in Pseudo by Emile Ajar / Romain Gary

Abstract

Romain Gary, born in Lithuania in 1914, won the Goncourt Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards of France with his novel Les Racines du Ciel (The Roots of Heaven) in 1956. Over time, although critics describe Gary as a repetitive, fruitless and barren author, he won the prize for the second time with La Vie devant soi signed on Emile Ajar in 1975, but he played a game to the literary world rejecting this prize given to an author only once and for all during his life, and thus he attracted all the attention of the literary world. His novel, Pseudo, tells the story of the ambivalent and conflictual identity of the author in an ironic way. In this work, we will try to discuss the state of normality in a world of pretending, in a society where there are so many lies and how it is possible to be oneself. In this study which will be making use of a philosophical and eclectic approach employing the theories of thinkers such as Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger and Bourdieu from time to time, we will try to draw attention to the fact that this novel, which can be read as the hallucinations of a neurotic who commutes between civilian life and psychiatry clinics, claims to treat reality perhaps surpasses those illusions that prevail in the struggle with the fact and fiction. We will try to show how someone trying to hide himself to reduce belonging makes his existence possible within the effort of non-existence, and, on the other hand, how he could be non-existent in the impossibility of being-oneself.