Though Beauvoir's first philosophic

Though Beauvoir's first philosophical essay was Pyrrhus and Cinéas (1944) many of her interpreters identify She Came to Stay (1943) as her inaugural philosophical foray. It is a clear example of what she calls the metaphysical novel. The letters between Sartre and Beauvoir and Beauvoir's diaries of that period (published in the 1980s), show that both Beauvoir and Sartre were concerned with the question of the other, the issue of bad faith and the dynamics of desire. They were also examining the relationship and tensions between our singular existential status and the social conditions within which our singularity is lived. She Came to Stay is packed with philosophical reflections — reflections on our relationship to time, to each other,to ourselves. These reflections are never, however, systematized,argued for or brought to closure. They are lived in the concrete,ambiguously triangulated lives of Pierre, Xavière and Françoise. Opening with a quote from Hegel “Each conscience seeks the death of the other,” and ending with Françoise's murder of Xavière, which Beauvoir narrates as an act in which Françoise confronts her solitude and announces her freedom, the novel does not necessarily confirm Hegel's claim; for the point of the murder was not to eliminate the other per se but to destroy a particular other, Xavière, the other who threatened to leave Françoise without the other she loved, Pierre. Existential ambiguity trumps Hegelian clarity. The issues raised in this first novel, however, the ambiguity regarding the responsibilities and limits of freedom, the legitimacy of violence, the tension between our experience of ourselves as simultaneously solitary and interwined with others, the temptations of bad faith and the examination of the existentially faithful relationship to time will pervade Beauvoir's subsequent reflections.