5.3 Existentialist themes in world literature

Origins of Existentialism

Existentialism is a philosophical and literary movement centered on individual existence, freedom, and the challenge of creating meaning in a world that offers none on its own. It became a dominant force in literature during the mid-20th century, shaped by the devastation of two world wars and the collapse of faith in progress and tradition.

The movement didn't appear out of nowhere. Søren Kierkegaard, writing in the 1840s, argued that truth is found through subjective experience rather than abstract systems. Friedrich Nietzsche, later in the 19th century, declared "God is dead" and pushed the idea that individuals must forge their own values. These thinkers laid the groundwork decades before existentialism had a name.

Philosophical Foundations

Existentialism draws heavily from phenomenology, a branch of philosophy focused on how things appear to human consciousness rather than on objective, external reality. Edmund Husserl developed the concept of intentionality (the idea that consciousness is always about something), and Martin Heidegger built on this with his notion of Being-in-the-world, which treats human existence as inseparable from the context we live in.

What unites existentialist thinkers is a rejection of the idea that human nature is fixed or predetermined. There's no blueprint for what a person should be. Instead, you define yourself through your choices and actions.

Post-War Cultural Context

World War II was the catalyst that turned existentialism from a niche philosophical position into a cultural movement. The Holocaust, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the sheer scale of destruction shattered confidence in Enlightenment ideals of reason and progress.

• Traditional institutions (religion, government, science) seemed unable to prevent or explain such atrocities
• A generation of European intellectuals found themselves asking whether human existence had any inherent purpose
• Paris in the 1940s and 1950s became the epicenter, with Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir writing from the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés
• The movement spread quickly across Europe and into the Americas, Latin America, and parts of Asia and Africa

Key Existentialist Concepts

Absurdity of Existence

The absurd is the collision between two things: the human need for meaning and a universe that provides none. You want life to make sense, but the world is indifferent to that desire. This isn't a logical argument that life is pointless; it's a description of a felt tension.

Camus illustrated this with the myth of Sisyphus, condemned to roll a boulder uphill forever. The task is meaningless, yet Camus argued we must imagine Sisyphus happy, because the struggle itself becomes his purpose. The existentialist response to absurdity isn't despair; it's the insistence on creating meaning anyway.

Freedom and Responsibility

Sartre's famous claim that "existence precedes essence" is the core of this concept. Unlike a tool designed for a specific purpose, you exist first and define yourself afterward. There's no human nature that determines what you should do or be.

This sounds liberating, but it comes with a heavy burden:

• Every choice you make defines who you are
• You can't blame your nature, your upbringing, or God for what you become
• This radical freedom produces what Sartre called anguish (the weight of knowing your choices matter and nothing guarantees they're right)
• You're also responsible not just for yourself but for the image of humanity your choices project

Authenticity vs. Bad Faith

Authenticity means owning your freedom and making choices that genuinely reflect who you are, even when that's uncomfortable. Bad faith (mauvaise foi in Sartre's French) is the opposite: deceiving yourself into believing you have no choice.

A classic example of bad faith: a waiter who performs his role so rigidly that he becomes nothing but "a waiter," as if the job defines his entire being. He's hiding from the anxiety of freedom by collapsing his identity into a social role.

• Bad faith can look like "I had no choice" or "that's just who I am"
• Authenticity doesn't mean ignoring social reality; it means not letting external roles replace genuine self-determination
• The tension between societal expectations and personal authenticity runs through nearly every major existentialist text

Existentialist Authors

French Existentialists

Jean-Paul Sartre is often called the father of existentialism. His novel Nausea (1938) follows Antoine Roquentin as he becomes overwhelmed by the sheer contingency of existence. His play No Exit (1944) gave us the famous line "Hell is other people," exploring how we're trapped by others' perceptions of us. His philosophical treatise Being and Nothingness (1943) laid out the movement's theoretical framework.

Albert Camus is closely associated with existentialism, though he rejected the label, preferring to call his philosophy absurdism. The Stranger (1942) depicts Meursault, a man so detached from social conventions that his emotional indifference at his mother's funeral becomes evidence against him in a murder trial. The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) is his key philosophical essay on the absurd.

Simone de Beauvoir applied existentialist ideas to gender and oppression. In The Second Sex (1949), she argued that "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman," using the existentialist framework to show that femininity is a social construction, not a fixed essence. Her novels, including The Mandarins, also explore existentialist themes.

Other European Writers

Franz Kafka wrote before existentialism was named, but his work anticipates its central concerns. The Metamorphosis (1915) opens with Gregor Samsa waking up as a giant insect, and the story focuses less on the transformation itself than on the alienation and dehumanization that follow. The Trial (1925) depicts a man arrested and prosecuted by an impenetrable bureaucracy for a crime never specified.

Samuel Beckett, an Irish playwright working mostly in French, wrote Waiting for Godot (1953), the defining work of the Theatre of the Absurd. Two men wait endlessly for someone who never comes, filling time with circular conversation. The play dramatizes the experience of meaninglessness rather than arguing about it philosophically.

Fyodor Dostoevsky is a 19th-century precursor. Notes from Underground (1864) features a bitter, self-aware narrator who rejects rational self-interest and insists on the irrational freedom of the human will. Crime and Punishment (1866) explores guilt, freedom, and moral responsibility through Raskolnikov's attempt to place himself beyond conventional morality.

Non-Western Perspectives

Existentialist themes appear well beyond Europe:

• Lu Xun (China) explored alienation and the individual's struggle against oppressive social traditions in stories like A Madman's Diary and The True Story of Ah Q
• Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt) wove existentialist questions about meaning and identity into his portrayals of modern Cairo, particularly in his Cairo Trilogy and later novels like Children of the Alley
• Kenzaburō Ōe (Japan) examined post-war Japanese identity and personal crisis through an existentialist lens, notably in A Personal Matter, where a father confronts the birth of a disabled child and his own desire to flee responsibility

Recurring Themes

Alienation and Isolation

Existentialist literature returns again and again to characters who feel fundamentally disconnected. This isn't just loneliness in the social sense. It's a deeper estrangement from the world itself, from other people, and sometimes from one's own identity.

• Meursault in The Stranger can't feel what society expects him to feel
• Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis becomes literally inhuman, cut off from his family
• The Underground Man in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground isolates himself deliberately, yet craves connection
• This alienation often serves as the starting point for a character's confrontation with existential questions

Search for Meaning

If the universe doesn't hand you a purpose, what do you do? Existentialist characters try different strategies: relationships, creative work, rebellion, philosophical inquiry. Some succeed in constructing personal meaning; others fail or discover that the search itself is what matters.

The key tension is between the desire for significance and the suspicion that no ultimate significance exists. Characters who accept this tension and keep going anyway are often portrayed as more authentic than those who cling to comforting illusions.

Death and Mortality

Awareness of death shapes everything in existentialist thought. Heidegger's concept of Being-towards-death argues that confronting your own mortality is what makes authentic living possible. If you ignore death or pretend it won't come, you slip into complacency and bad faith.

• Death gives urgency to choices: your time is finite, so what you do with it matters
• Many existentialist works use death as a catalyst that forces characters to examine their lives
• Attitudes range from Camus's defiant acceptance to Kafka's characters, who seem trapped in systems that grind them down without explanation

Literary Techniques

Stream of Consciousness

This technique reproduces the flow of a character's thoughts as they actually occur: fragmented, associative, jumping between memory, sensation, and reflection. It puts you inside a character's subjective experience rather than describing it from the outside.

In existentialist fiction, stream of consciousness reinforces the idea that reality is filtered through individual perception. Sartre uses it in Nausea to show Roquentin's growing horror at the sheer thereness of objects. The technique blurs the line between what's happening externally and what's happening in the character's mind.

Unreliable Narrators

An unreliable narrator is a character telling the story whose account you can't fully trust. They might be lying, self-deceived, or simply limited in their understanding.

This technique connects directly to existentialist philosophy:

• There's no omniscient, objective viewpoint available to us; all experience is subjective
• Characters in bad faith are, by definition, unreliable about their own motivations
• Readers are forced to actively interpret rather than passively receive the story
• Meursault in The Stranger and the narrator of Notes from Underground are both unreliable in different ways

Fragmented Narratives

Existentialist works often break away from linear, cause-and-effect storytelling. Events may be presented out of order, episodes may seem disconnected, and traditional plot resolution may be absent entirely.

This mirrors the existentialist view that life doesn't follow a neat narrative arc. There's no guaranteed climax or resolution. By fragmenting the narrative, authors force you to construct meaning from the pieces, which parallels the existentialist challenge of constructing meaning from a disordered existence.

Notable Existentialist Works

Novels and Novellas

• Nausea (Sartre, 1938): Antoine Roquentin, living alone in a provincial town, becomes increasingly disturbed by the raw, contingent nature of existence. Objects lose their familiar meanings, and he's left confronting the absurdity of being alive.
• The Stranger (Camus, 1942): Meursault kills an Arab man on an Algerian beach and is put on trial, where his emotional detachment becomes more damning than the crime itself. The novel exposes how society punishes those who refuse to perform expected emotions.
• The Trial (Kafka, 1925): Josef K. is arrested one morning and spends the rest of the novel navigating a legal system that never explains his crime. The bureaucracy is both absurd and terrifying.
• Notes from Underground (Dostoevsky, 1864): A bitter, hyper-self-conscious narrator rejects rationalism and argues for the irrational core of human freedom. Often considered the first existentialist novel.

Plays and Theater

• No Exit (Sartre, 1944): Three people are locked in a room together for eternity. There's no torturer; they torment each other. "Hell is other people" captures the idea that we're always defined, in part, by how others see us.
• Waiting for Godot (Beckett, 1953): Vladimir and Estragon wait by a tree for someone named Godot, who never arrives. The play strips away plot, setting, and character development to expose the bare experience of existing without purpose.
• Rhinoceros (Ionesco, 1959): The inhabitants of a small town gradually transform into rhinoceroses. Only one man, Bérenger, resists. The play uses absurdist imagery to examine conformity and the pressure to surrender individual identity.
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard, 1966): Two minor characters from Hamlet become the protagonists, bewildered by events they can't understand or control. The play explores free will, fate, and the experience of being insignificant within a larger story.

Essays and Non-Fiction

• The Myth of Sisyphus (Camus, 1942): Opens with the claim that "there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide." Camus argues that even in a meaningless universe, life is worth living through revolt, freedom, and passion.
• Being and Nothingness (Sartre, 1943): Sartre's major philosophical work, laying out concepts like bad faith, being-for-itself vs. being-in-itself, and the role of consciousness in constructing reality. Dense but foundational.
• The Second Sex (de Beauvoir, 1949): Applies existentialist philosophy to the situation of women, arguing that gender roles are constructed rather than natural. A landmark in both existentialist thought and feminist theory.
• The Rebel (Camus, 1951): Examines rebellion as a response to absurdity, tracing the history of revolutionary thought and arguing that authentic revolt must respect human limits.

Influence on World Literature

Modernist Movements

Existentialism overlapped with and fed into broader modernist experimentation. The Theatre of the Absurd (Beckett, Ionesco, Genet) grew directly from existentialist and absurdist philosophy. Existentialist emphasis on subjective experience also reinforced the psychological depth found in writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, though both were working before existentialism was formally named.

In the United States, the Beat Generation (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs) absorbed existentialist ideas about nonconformity, personal freedom, and the rejection of mainstream values.

Postmodern Literature

Postmodernism took existentialism's skepticism further. Where existentialists questioned whether life has inherent meaning, postmodernists questioned whether stable meaning is possible at all.

• Postmodern authors like Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo explore fragmented identities and the breakdown of grand narratives
• Metafiction (fiction that draws attention to its own construction) extends the existentialist idea that meaning is created, not found
• The existentialist unreliable narrator evolves into postmodern narrative games where multiple contradictory versions of reality coexist

Contemporary Fiction

Existentialist themes remain alive in contemporary literature, even when authors don't identify with the movement:

• Novels exploring alienation in a hyper-connected, digital world echo existentialist concerns about authenticity
• Dystopian and speculative fiction often dramatizes the tension between individual freedom and systemic control
• Authors like Haruki Murakami, Herta Müller, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie engage with questions of identity, meaning, and isolation that trace back to existentialist roots

Criticism and Interpretations

Philosophical Debates

Existentialism has faced criticism from multiple directions:

• Marxists argue it's too focused on the individual and ignores how social and economic structures shape human experience
• Analytical philosophers have questioned whether existentialist claims are rigorous enough to count as philosophy
• Critics have pointed to a risk of moral relativism: if everyone creates their own meaning, is anything truly wrong?
• Defenders respond that existentialism doesn't reject ethics; it insists that ethical choices must be genuinely chosen rather than blindly inherited

Literary Analysis

Scholars examine how well existentialist literature actually conveys its philosophical ideas. Some key questions:

• Does the form of the work (fragmented narrative, unreliable narrator) reinforce the philosophical content, or does it just make the text confusing?
• How do symbolism and metaphor function differently in existentialist works compared to realist fiction?
• What happens to character development when a philosophy of radical freedom meets the constraints of narrative structure?

Cultural Impact

Existentialism's influence extends well beyond literature. It shaped mid-century European cinema (Bergman, Antonioni), visual art, and music. Politically, existentialist ideas about freedom and responsibility informed anti-colonial movements and civil rights discourse. The movement's emphasis on personal authenticity continues to resonate in debates about identity and self-expression across cultures.

Existentialism vs. Other Philosophies

Existentialism vs. Nihilism

These two are often confused, but the difference matters.

Nihilism tends toward passivity or despair. Existentialism demands action and responsibility. Sartre would say that even choosing not to act is a choice you're responsible for.

Existentialism vs. Absurdism

The distinction here is subtler, since Camus developed absurdism partly in dialogue with Sartre's existentialism.

Both reject despair. But where Sartre believes meaning can be genuinely constructed, Camus is more skeptical. For Camus, the proper response to the absurd is revolt, freedom, and passion, not the construction of a new system of meaning.

Legacy and Relevance

Contemporary Applications

Existentialist ideas have practical applications that extend beyond literature and philosophy:

• Existential psychotherapy (developed by figures like Rollo May and Irvin Yalom) helps patients confront anxiety, mortality, isolation, and meaninglessness directly rather than treating them as symptoms to eliminate
• Logotherapy, created by Viktor Frankl (a Holocaust survivor), focuses specifically on helping people find personal meaning, drawing on existentialist principles
• Educational approaches emphasizing self-directed learning and critical thinking owe a debt to existentialist ideas about individual responsibility
• Bioethics and medical ethics frequently engage with existentialist questions about autonomy, choice, and the meaning of suffering

Existentialism in Popular Culture

Existentialist themes have filtered into mainstream culture in ways that are sometimes explicit, sometimes subtle:

• Films like The Matrix (questioning the nature of reality and authentic choice) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (identity, memory, and meaning in relationships) engage directly with existentialist questions
• Video games like BioShock (free will vs. control) and The Stanley Parable (the illusion of choice) use interactivity to let players experience existentialist dilemmas rather than just read about them
• Music across genres, from post-punk to hip-hop, grapples with alienation, authenticity, and the search for meaning
• Graphic novels like Watchmen (Moore) and The Sandman (Gaiman) explore mortality, identity, and the construction of meaning through visual storytelling