Gabrielle Roy and Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The pivotal work within the literary corpus of both Antoine de Saint-Exupery and Gabrielle Roy each, significantly, bears the title Terre des hommes. Saint-Exupery encapsulates the results of a searching existential and humanist enquiry into a recit (1939), and Roy her similar findings into a thirty-page essay commissioned to introduce the 1967 Montreal World Exposition, itself named Terre des Hommes. These pieces of writing, and the development of their key themes in other texts, lend themselves eminently to comparison for through Roy's essay we learn of her specific attraction to the Exuperian ethos of l'homme (self) and man's interaction with la terre (non-self). The present study aims principally to detect the presence of these essences in each author's work. In a subsidiary way it also endeavours to situate their rationals within a certain historico-literary context. Finally, an attempt is made to critically assess especially Roy's distinctive representation, through literature, of the self and the exterior world.