As I look over the almost twenty-four hundred pages that comprise the rest of The Family Idiot, I am, once again, almost paralyzed by the choice that must require me to leave out so much. The three other works that we have considered, as difficult as they are in places, are relatively contained. Fortunately, however, my aim is merely to elaborate the logic that connects the whole. In this respect, I must note that, for the most part, I am not happy with the basic divisions of this massive work. On the other hand, it is not really necessary to keep them in mind, as I will be examining only very large segments. Still, I will give the English versions of the basic divisions of volumes 2–5 in a footnote, and I should also inform my reader, that, from now to the conclusion of this study, I will be concerned only with the English translation into five volumes of the original three in French.

VOLUMES 2–4: PERSONALIZATION TO LAST SPIRAL

Volume 2: Personalization: “What Is Beauty If Not the Impossible?”

We can begin with the happy observation that – in the first fifteen pages or so of volume 2 – Sartre gives a clear description of the task he plans to accomplish in these three volumes: “Thus while our previous descriptions attempted to leave nothing obscure, we never arrived at little Gustave's personalization, an effort made through passive activity to unify the internalized family structures” (2: 7).