A great deal of scholarly work has been done to demonstrate the dominance of the paradigm of commitment [al-iltizām] in Arabic literature of the 1950s and 1960s, to determine the elements of this ideological complex, and to track its historical mutation in relation to French cultural influence and the conflict with Israel. Relatively little work, however, has been done to explain the influence of this paradigm on the forms of Arabic literature and specifically those of the novel. This paper studies two Lebanese novels from the 1950s, both of which engage the logic, mood, and philosophical referents of existentialism, out of which commitment is generally understood to emerge. In particular, I focus on the narrative representation of the present, which is integral to both the existentialist thematics of decision and self-realization as well as the anticolonial insistence on revolutionary action now. In these novels, the present isn’t merely a topic of reflection; rather, the urgency of the moment is transposed into the fundaments of a new literary style. I have selected two novels that bear representative value during this period in the metabolization of Sartrean commitment. Suhayl Idris’s Al-Ḥayy al-Lātīnī [The Latin Quarter, 1953] details the experiences of a Lebanese man whose misadventures in France undo him as both a character and narrator. Idris registers the present time of commitment in the forms of plenitude that characterize a life reconciled to its homeland, to which the narrator returns in the final pages. Since the price to be paid for this reconciliation with the nation is the exclusion of meaningful relationships with women, I turn to fellow Lebanese writer Layla Ba’albaki’s Anā Aḥyā [I Am Alive, 1958] to substantiate an alternative imagination of commitment. Whereas Idris’s protagonist finds commitment in an almost mystical communion with fellow male nationalists, Ba’albaki’s narrator finds her voice by withdrawing from constraining relations with men and affirming her existence in the presence of herself. Both novels pioneer new paths for the Arabic novel, taking the present-time of commitment as the rationale for literary forms that sharply differ from their predecessors. Both offer a thick, phenomenological account of living in the present. But they differ in their assessment of what possibilities the present affords and so in their formal representation of living presently.