  The novel comes very close to theatre as the art-form of choice for the existentialists. For most existentialists, the ultimate models were not philosophers, but contemporary novelists; two of whom were especially paradigmatic, viz., Dostoievsky and Kafka. Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus saw themselves in equal measure as writers of fiction and as philosophers. They engaged with each other’s fictional work at least as much, if not more, than with their theoretical one (Camus 1938b, 1939, Sartre 1943b). Indeed, as already noted, fiction and autobiographical writings were direct applications of their philosophical visions. “To think is to create a world,” writes Camus, showing the deep identity between philosophical and fictional creation (Camus 1942b, 87–91). The reason is the same as with theatre: narrative fiction, focused on a series of ‘situations’ in which the fundamental existential choices facing human beings can be carefully staged, is a powerful mode of engaging the free imagination of the reader, and thus of calling him or her to action: “What in fact is a novel but a universe in which action is endowed with form?” (Camus 1951, 263). The novel is a revelation of the world, notably in its social and political urgency, by a freedom for other freedoms. As Merleau-Ponty writes in “Metaphysics and the Novel”: “Intellectual works had always been concerned with establishing a certain attitude toward the world, of which literature and philosophy, like politics, are just different expressions; but only now [thanks to existentialist philosophy] has this concern become explicit” (Merleau-Ponty 1945c, 27; see also Camus 1942b, 92 and 1951, 258–267).