Looking through the eyes of the Other: Sartrean reader consciousness

This article applies Jean-Paul Sartre's proposition in Being and Nothingness of “the Look” (le regard) to the context of fiction, offering a phenomenological perspective on why bibliophiles sense they inhabit the world of the text. Contributing to an Other-centered ethics identified in contemporary narrative theory, the author argues that Looking through the eyes of the narrator affords textual encounters that prioritize the experiences of Others to produce ethically involved readers. Through the Look, Sartre theorizes a commonly accepted dyadic structure of human relations that alienates self from Other. He proposes that a mutual process of objectification occurs when we hold each other's gaze, which prevents us from knowing the Other. However, the imaginative displacement inherent in reading first-person fiction resolves this standoff, allowing us to say I and yet mean another. Applying the Look to reading, the author analyzes Nina Bouraoui's intersectional novel Garçon manqué (Tomboy: A Novel; 2000), whose narrator is Othered as Algerian French, queer, and gender nonconforming. The strategic use of narration devices induces reader experiences of the Look and invites embodiment of the I-figure, activating reader consciousness, a sentient engagement with the narrating Other, for whom the reader develops a Levinasian sense of responsibility.