The Last Chance: Roads of Freedom IV

The Last Chance brings to an English-speaking audience for the first time the unfinished fourth volume of Jean-Paul Sartre’s hugely important Roads of Freedom cycle. Roads of Freedom is generally read and regarded as a trilogy, made up of Age of Reason, The Reprieve and Troubled Sleep. In fact, Sartre began a fourth volume and, although he never finished the work, two chapters, ‘Strange Friendship’ and ‘Last Chance’, were published in French by Gallimard after his death. Set in a German prisoner of war camp, these chapters continue the story of Roads of Freedom, exploring the interrelations of politics, responsibility, friendship and freedom – themes central to Sartrean existentialism. The Pleiade edition published by Gallimard included a previously unpublished interview with Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir’s account of his plans for the fourth volume, and an introduction to the unfinished fragments by the editor, Michel Contat. All this material is now published here in this, the first English-language edition of a work that makes an enormous contribution to our understanding of Sartre’s hugely influential cycle.