A Very Easy Death

Simone, Hélène, and the doctors lie to Françoise out of fear that knowing she’s dying will hasten her death and poison her final days with dread. In 1960s France, it was common to withhold a terminal diagnosis from a patient for this reason, As Simone’s guilt indicates, however, the choice to do so was still fraught with difficult consequences. Beauvoir’s interest in lying as an ethical quandary is shown in her 1947 book The Ethics of Ambiguity which explores the morality of prevarication. In withholding Françoise’s diagnosis, Simone acts against her stated belief in the ethical responsibility not to infringe on others’ freedom of choice: Simone denies her mother the informed freedom to choose how she will spend her final days because she doesn’t know that they’re her final days.

Although this is a single lie in reality, in the narrative it has the resonance of a recurrent motif: the lie is a choice that Simone makes day after day and her unsparing and exhaustive account of this ethical interrogation creates a sense of layered up deceit. The main lie also creates other dependent lies or misleading behaviors, such as the lie about peritonitis, or that Simone going to Prague indicates her belief in Françoise’s recovery.