An insight formulated by Kierkegaard in 1838 and echoed by Sartre about one hundred years later signals the importance of this transformation: in order for novelistic characters to be compelling, the author should not appear to have decided their fate in advance but give readers a sense of their open freedom, in "a time resembling my own, one in which the future does not exist," Sartre recommends (p. 66). Ong identifies in these ideas an "existentialist poetics of the novel," and describes her project as follows: "The Art of Being aims to develop an account of the impact of the existentialists' discovery upon our understanding of the form of the novel and of the narrative strategies by which novels draw their readers into the fictional reality of the lives and worlds they represent" (p. 23). At stake here is the attention that Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Beauvoir direct toward "the fundamental question of what a novel is" (p. 37), a novel's ontology, and the ways formal features—plot, description, the representation of unfinished art works—disclose fundamental aspects of human existence. ...chapter 2 zooms in on Portrait of a Lady, which Ong places in a constellation of other nineteenth-century novels of marriage, in which a series of dialectical shifts are shown to generate narrative structure. Sartre describes the "stupefaction" of most Frenchmen upon discovering history around 1930 in terms of a world-shattering, consciousness-altering situation, which shifted people's worldview from a stable social environment populated by other human beings (such as in the realist novel) to a universe of individual confrontation with the forces of Good and Evil.3 The latter disclosed human existence as metaphysical, for which the literary forms consecrated by centuries of novels of manners, novels of psychological analysis, in short,