The Self-Taught Man’s Experience in the Prisoner-of-War Camp

The Self-Taught Man’s Experience in the Prisoner-of-War Camp explains how a wartime experience of forced proximity became, for the Self-Taught Man, a source of lasting attachment to other people and a path toward political commitment. Captured during the First World War, he encountered solidarity in a crowded wooden shed and in communal religious observances; after his release, the absence of that collective life left him unsettled until he found a vocation in socialism.

Capture and the camp

The Self-Taught Man recalls that he enlisted when the First World War began without understanding why. He spent two years at the front, where, as he tells Antoine Roquentin, there was little time for reflection. Captured at the end of 1917, he became a prisoner of war. He notes that some soldiers regained their childhood faith while imprisoned, but says his own experience led him elsewhere: he did not believe in God, whose existence he considered contradicted by science, yet he learned to believe in people.

The conditions that led to this change were plain and physical. In the final months of the war, the prisoners were given little work. When it rained, guards herded about two hundred men into a large wooden shed and shut the door, leaving them packed together in almost complete darkness. The Self-Taught Man initially thought the crush would suffocate him. Then, instead of fear alone, he felt an overwhelming joy and a wish to embrace the men around him, whom he experienced as brothers. The same response returned whenever he was sent into the shed.

Fellowship as a sacred experience

The shed acquired a sacred character for the Self-Taught Man, not through formal religious instruction but because it preserved the memory of a shared experience. At times he evaded the guards and entered it alone. In the darkness, recalling the joy he had felt among the prisoners, he would become absorbed for hours and sometimes weep. Even alone, he used the place to recover the feeling of communion that had first arisen in the crowd.

He also describes Sunday Mass as another occasion when collective experience became spiritually meaningful. A French chaplain with one arm celebrated, accompanied by a harmonium. Standing bareheaded among the other prisoners, the Self-Taught Man felt united with them as the music carried him along. He interpreted the Mass’s central mystery as a communion of souls, although he had never been a believer. After the war, he sometimes went to church on Sunday mornings in memory of those services. His recollection thus distinguishes institutional belief from the fellowship he experienced through shared presence and ritual.

After release

The year of the Self-Taught Man’s liberation was 1919. In the months that followed, he felt miserable and unable to find what to do with himself. The solidarity he had experienced in captivity did not simply translate into an ease with ordinary life: seeing people gathered together, he would insert himself into their group, and he once followed the funeral procession of a stranger. In a moment of despair, he threw his stamp collection into a fire. These details show how urgently he sought collective belonging after losing the camp’s enforced community.

Eventually, he says, he found his vocation. He tells Roquentin that he is a socialist, then specifies that he had been a registered member of the Socialist Party, S.F.I.O., since September 1921. His disclosure is personal as well as political: he presents membership as the answer to a period of aimlessness and as an affiliation that makes him happy. The pride with which he tells Roquentin contrasts with his earlier misery after release.

Meaning and limits of the recollection

The experience helps explain why the Self-Taught Man places such importance on human fellowship. His conviction did not begin as a doctrine learned from books or as a return to religious faith. It grew out of imprisonment: the close physical presence of other men, the repeated joy he felt among them, and the memory he continued to seek after the war. His account connects that emotional history to his later socialist identity without claiming that political membership reproduces the camp experience exactly.

The episode also provides a contrast to Antoine Roquentin’s own reflections on existence. While Roquentin’s thoughts turn toward the difficulty of escaping his consciousness and the contingency of existence, the Self-Taught Man recalls discovering a sense of human connection in a crowd. Their exchange makes the source of his commitment clear: for him, believing in people is grounded in remembered solidarity, rather than in a theological claim or an abstract slogan.