The Flies evoke guilt from those who committed them. Sartre does this to reiterate the importance of amenability; he wants to prove that remorse should only be felt if one believes the act committed is wrong. By acting in what he believes to be a righteous way and killing the king and queen, Orestes takes responsibility for his actions without feeling any remorse for them. The Flies The Flies () is a play by Jean-Paul Sartre, written in 1943. It is an adaptation of the Electra myth, previously used by the Greek playwrights Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides. The play recounts the story
Jean-Paul Sartre a writer of the "corbeau" (anonymous denunciatory letters) meant that no-one really said what they meant anymore, imposing self-censorship. Sartre and his friends at the Café de Flore had reasons for their fear; by September 1940, the "Abwehr" alone had already recruited 32,000 French people to work as "mouches" while by 1942 the Paris "Kommandantur" was receiving an average of 1,500 letters/per day sent by the "corbeaux". Sartre wrote under the occupation Paris had become a "sham", resembling the empty wine bottles displayed in shop windows as all of the wine had been exported to Germany, looking like the old