For foul imagery in The Flies and Orestes as an existential outsider read R. W.

Artintian, Foul
Winds in Argos: Sartre's "Les Mouches".
On the question of idea of liberty vis-a-vis Nazi interpretation of the play see Allan Stoekl, What the
Nazis Saw: "Les Mouches" in Occupied Paris.

For ethical conflict in Sartre and postmodernism see Alain J.-J. Cohen, Greek Models for Postmodern
Times: Foucault and Lacan on Ethics and the Arts of Existence:
“Ethical conflicts are envisioned in systematic mise-en-scene at the heart of many of Sartre's legendary
plays. In Les mouches, for instance, Sartre’s Orestes faces an Existentialist double bind, illustrated by his
incapacity to avoid choices - ultimately tempered by remorse and guilt emblematized by the (antique and
modern) aggressively and annoyingly sadistic flies or Eumenides. There is no way out of this double
bind. There is no catharsis for this Existentialist hero/anti-hero (Cohen, 1999). Besides showcasing
Orestes as its morally conflicted and psychologically fragmented character, Les mouches is a play about
“man’s freedom in conflict with the impotence and omnipotence of the gods” (Pucciani, 320). The play
also manifests several postmodern features in its combination of redux versions of Homeric legends, such
as AEschylus's Eumenides and Euripedes’s Iphigenia among the Tauri.

The virtuoso Existentialist dramaturgy replays fragments of Greek legend and tragedy, at the core of
which rests the case of Electra’s passivity and Orestes’s hesitant murder (of Clytemnestra and her lover
Aegysthus) in revenge for the murder of Orestes's father (Agamemnon). Thus the haunting Greek
imaginary empowers Sartre to focus anew upon questions of conflict and moral choice, in an interweave
between a priori freedom and contingent facticity and, moreover, in a necessarily hermetic reference to
the German Occupation of France, in itself a compelling situation). In thus focusing, Sartre resorts to an
illustration, through dramatic fiction, of the unavoidable moral questions, albeit posed contemporaneously
in philosophical terms. Therein lies Sartre's secret of creativity. In a Moebius flow accompanied by
suspensions and parenthesis, philosophical questions need the exemplum of fiction while fiction leads
back to philosophical inquiry.”