Christmas’s torture and death serve as the culminating example in Sartre’s account of sadism’s failure. Drawing on the closing pages of Faulkner’s Light in August, Sartre shows how the victim’s look turns the torturers’ attempt to dominate him into an encounter with a freedom they cannot control; the violence instead fixes their actions in memory and exposes the futility of their project.

Context and Participants

Sartre introduces the episode while examining the sadist’s effort to appropriate a victim’s transcendent freedom. Treating another person as an instrument cannot deliver that freedom: the sadist can act only on the victim as an object in the world, not possess the victim’s freedom as a subject. The episode from Faulkner’s novel gives this abstract limit a concrete form.

The perpetrators are described as the town’s “good citizens,” who hunt Christmas down and inflict lethal violence on him. Christmas is near death when the scene focuses on his response to them. The passage thus places the victim’s encounter with his torturers, rather than the mechanics of their violence, at the center of Sartre’s argument.

The Victim’s Look

Christmas lies still, conscious, and looks up at the men. His eyes are described as peaceful, unfathomable, and unbearable. That look reverses the direction of attention: the torturers, who have sought to make Christmas an object of their power, confront themselves as seen by him.

Sartre treats this moment as the victim’s freedom becoming manifest to the sadist. The look makes the torturer experience the alienation of his own being in another person’s freedom. His effort to reduce Christmas to an instrument cannot erase the fact that Christmas remains a subject whose look gives the encounter a meaning the torturer does not command.

Failure and Consequence

The episode’s consequence extends beyond the immediate encounter. In Faulkner’s scene, Christmas’s image enters the torturers’ memories and remains there. Sartre reads this lasting memory as a reversal: the men who sought to dominate their victim cannot prevent his look from becoming part of their own future experience.

That reversal exposes the failure at the heart of sadism. The sadist wants to enslave freedom, but his attempt can only turn the activity into an objectified property—“sadism”—for the Other. Even humiliation and pleas for mercy cannot make the victim’s freedom something the sadist owns. When Christmas looks at his torturers, the goal of sadism collapses along with the belief that its activity can recover the sadist’s being-for-others.

Role in Sartre’s Argument

Sartre uses Christmas’s death to return from the apparent position of the one who looks to the condition of being looked at. The sadist’s attempt to control the Other leads back into the same circle: the Other’s freedom can make the sadist an object, just as the sadist has tried to objectify the Other. The scene therefore demonstrates, rather than resolves, the conflict built into being-for-others.

The episode also supports Sartre’s broader claim that sexual attitudes toward the Other cannot be reduced from the outset to physiology. Desire, love, and related attitudes arise with the body and the Other, while bodily constitution provides their expression under conditions of contingency. Christmas’s look crystallizes the existential limit underlying these attitudes: another person’s freedom can be encountered and affected, but not appropriated as an object.