5.7 Influence of Existentialism and Absurdism on world literature

Origins of Existentialism

Existentialism and absurdism reshaped how writers around the world approached fiction, drama, and poetry from the mid-20th century onward. These philosophical movements gave authors new tools for exploring what it means to be human in a world that offers no built-in answers.

While existentialism has roots stretching back to the 19th century, it became a dominant cultural force after World War II. The scale of destruction, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb shattered confidence in progress, reason, and traditional moral frameworks. Writers and philosophers responded by asking a stark question: if the old certainties are gone, how do we live?

Key Existentialist Philosophers

• Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) is often called the "father of existentialism." Writing decades before the movement had a name, he emphasized individual choice, subjective experience, and the "leap of faith" required to live authentically.
• Martin Heidegger developed the concept of Dasein ("Being-in-the-World"), arguing that human existence is always embedded in a specific situation and time. His work shaped how later existentialists thought about authenticity and mortality.
• Jean-Paul Sartre became the public face of existentialism through both philosophy (Being and Nothingness, 1943) and literature. He coined the phrase "existence precedes essence."
• Albert Camus explored absurdism as a related but distinct branch of thought, most famously in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) and his novels.
• Simone de Beauvoir extended existentialist ideas into feminist philosophy. Her landmark work The Second Sex (1949) argued that women's identities are socially constructed rather than biologically determined, applying the existentialist framework to gender.

Post-War Cultural Context

The post-war period created fertile ground for existentialist thinking across several fronts:

• Widespread disillusionment with traditional values and religious certainty after the horrors of World War II
• Rapid technological change that produced feelings of alienation and a loss of human connection
• The rise of consumer culture and mass media, which many intellectuals saw as promoting inauthenticity
• Cold War tensions and the threat of nuclear annihilation, which made questions about life's meaning feel urgent and immediate
• Decolonization movements across Africa and Asia, which challenged Western assumptions about progress and civilization

Fundamental Existentialist Concepts

Existence Precedes Essence

This is the core claim of existentialism, and Sartre put it most directly: there is no predetermined human nature or divine blueprint for what a person should be. You exist first, and then you define yourself through your choices and actions.

Traditional philosophy and religion generally worked the other way around: human beings have a fixed essence (a soul, a nature, a purpose), and existence is just the playing out of that design. Existentialism flips this. You're thrown into the world without a script, and the meaning of your life is something you build, not something you discover.

In literature, this concept produces characters who struggle to define themselves without external guidelines. Meursault in The Stranger and Roquentin in Nausea both confront a world that refuses to hand them a ready-made identity.

Freedom and Responsibility

Existentialists argue that humans are "condemned to be free," as Sartre put it. You can't avoid making choices, and you can't escape responsibility for those choices by blaming God, society, or human nature.

• This radical freedom produces anguish: the awareness that your decisions shape not just your own life but also serve as a model for how others might act
• Bad faith (mauvaise foi) is Sartre's term for the self-deception people use to avoid confronting their freedom, such as hiding behind social roles or claiming "I had no choice"
• Literary characters caught in moral dilemmas, forced to act without certainty, are a direct expression of this concept

Absurdity of Life

The absurd arises from a specific collision: humans desperately want the universe to make sense, but the universe is silent and indifferent. It's not that life is meaningless in some abstract way. The absurd is the gap between our need for meaning and the world's refusal to provide it.

Camus illustrated this with the myth of Sisyphus, condemned to roll a boulder uphill forever. The task is pointless, yet Camus famously concluded, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." The absurd doesn't demand despair; it demands honest confrontation.

In literature, this tension drives characters who face existential crises, question social norms, and search for purpose in a cosmos that offers none.

Existentialism in Literature

French Existentialist Writers

France was the epicenter of existentialist literature, and several writers turned philosophical ideas into compelling fiction:

• Jean-Paul Sartre wrote novels (Nausea), plays (No Exit, with its famous line "Hell is other people"), and short stories that dramatize existentialist concepts directly
• Albert Camus produced fiction that embodies absurdism: The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947) remain two of the most widely read novels of the 20th century
• Simone de Beauvoir explored existentialist ideas through a feminist lens in novels like She Came to Stay (1943) and The Mandarins (1954), which won the Prix Goncourt
• André Malraux examined existential questions in political and revolutionary settings, particularly in Man's Fate (1933), set during the Shanghai uprising
• Boris Vian blended existentialist themes with surrealism and dark humor in Froth on the Daydream (1947)

Existentialist Themes in Fiction

Across cultures and styles, existentialist fiction tends to return to a recognizable set of concerns:

• Alienation and isolation: characters cut off from society, other people, or even their own emotions
• Authenticity vs. conformity: the struggle to live honestly rather than performing a social role
• Mortality: confrontation with death as the ultimate limit on human freedom
• Consequences of freedom: characters who must live with the results of their choices, without excuses
• The search for meaning: protagonists trying to construct purpose in a world that provides none

Absurdist Drama

Absurdist theater, sometimes called the Theatre of the Absurd (a term coined by critic Martin Esslin in 1961), took existentialist ideas and pushed them into radical new dramatic forms. These plays don't just discuss meaninglessness; they perform it through broken language, circular plots, and situations that resist logical interpretation.

• Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1953): Two men wait endlessly for someone who never arrives. The play has almost no plot, yet it became one of the most influential works of the 20th century.
• Eugène Ionesco, The Bald Soprano (1950) and Rhinoceros (1959): Uses absurd situations and nonsensical dialogue to expose the emptiness of everyday conversation and the dangers of conformity.
• Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party (1957) and The Caretaker (1959): Features menacing silences, ambiguous dialogue, and unexplained threats. Critics coined the term "Pinteresque" for his distinctive style.
• Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966): Retells Hamlet from the perspective of two minor characters who can't understand the plot they're trapped in.
• Edward Albee, The Zoo Story (1958): A chance encounter on a park bench escalates into a confrontation with existential isolation.

Influence on World Literature

Existentialism Across Cultures

Existentialist and absurdist ideas didn't stay in Paris. Writers around the world adapted these concepts to their own cultural contexts, often producing something quite different from the French originals.

• Japan: Kōbō Abe's The Woman in the Dunes (1962) traps a man in a sand pit with a woman, creating an allegory of existential entrapment and the search for identity
• Latin America: Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch (1963) blends existentialist questioning with experimental structure, inviting readers to choose their own path through the novel
• Africa: Chinua Achebe and other postcolonial writers addressed existential questions about identity and meaning in the context of colonialism's aftermath, though Achebe was also critical of Western existentialism's individualism
• Eastern Europe: Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) examined freedom, authenticity, and meaning under the pressures of communist Czechoslovakia
• Middle East: Naguib Mahfouz explored existential themes within Islamic cultural settings, particularly in his Cairo Trilogy and later experimental novels

Impact on Postmodern Literature

Existentialism helped lay the groundwork for postmodernism. Many techniques that postmodern writers use trace back to existentialist and absurdist experiments:

• Fragmented narratives and non-linear storytelling that mirror the disorder of lived experience
• Deconstruction of traditional forms: questioning whether novels need plots, whether characters need coherent identities
• Metafiction: stories that draw attention to their own status as fiction, questioning the boundary between reality and narrative
• Multiple perspectives: rejecting a single authoritative viewpoint in favor of subjective, competing accounts
• Characters grappling with identity: protagonists in writers like Don DeLillo, Paul Auster, and Haruki Murakami owe a clear debt to existentialist fiction

Existentialist Elements in Poetry

• T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922): Reflects existential despair in the aftermath of World War I, though Eliot himself moved toward religious faith rather than existentialism
• Allen Ginsberg, Howl (1956): Channels existential rage against conformity and spiritual emptiness in 1950s America
• Sylvia Plath: Her confessional poetry explores alienation, identity, and the search for meaning with raw intensity
• Pablo Neruda: His later works move beyond political poetry into existential reflections on mortality and the passage of time
• Wisława Szymborska: The Polish Nobel laureate examines existential questions with characteristic irony and precision

Major Existentialist Works

Sartre's Nausea (1938)

Nausea is often considered the first existentialist novel. The protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, is a historian living alone in a French coastal town who begins to experience a disturbing physical sensation he calls "nausea." This feeling arises from his growing awareness that objects and experiences have no inherent meaning or necessity; everything simply exists, without reason.

Sartre uses a diary format and stream-of-consciousness passages to immerse the reader in Roquentin's psychological state. The novel explores contingency (the idea that nothing has to exist), radical freedom, and the vertigo that comes from recognizing the absurdity of existence. It's a challenging read, but it translates Sartre's philosophy into visceral, lived experience.

Camus' The Stranger (1942)

The Stranger follows Meursault, a French Algerian who narrates his life in flat, detached prose. The novel opens with one of the most famous lines in modern literature: "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure." Meursault's emotional indifference sets the tone for everything that follows, including a seemingly motiveless murder he commits on a beach.

The second half of the novel becomes a trial, but what's really being judged is Meursault's refusal to perform the emotions society expects. He won't cry at his mother's funeral or express remorse for the killing. Camus uses this to expose the absurdity of social conventions and the way society punishes those who won't play along. The novel exemplifies Camus' absurdist philosophy: Meursault is honest about the meaninglessness he perceives, and society condemns him for it.

Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1953)

Waiting for Godot changed what theater could be. Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait by a tree for someone named Godot, who never comes. They talk, argue, encounter two strangers (Pozzo and Lucky), and repeat the cycle. The play has two acts that mirror each other, reinforcing the sense of futile repetition.

There's no traditional plot, no character development, and no resolution. The dialogue often loops back on itself or dissolves into nonsense. Yet the play is also darkly funny. Beckett strips away everything audiences expected from theater and leaves only the bare situation: two people waiting, filling time, unable to leave. The result is a powerful dramatization of existential themes: the search for meaning, the passage of time, and the human need for companionship even in absurd circumstances.

Absurdism vs. Existentialism

Philosophical Differences

These two movements overlap significantly, but they diverge on a crucial point:

Both acknowledge the absence of cosmic purpose. The difference is in the response. Sartre believed you could build genuine meaning through engagement and responsibility. Camus thought the gap between human longing and universal silence could never be closed, but that revolt against absurdity (continuing to live fully despite it) was the proper response.

• Existentialists emphasize authenticity and responsibility
• Absurdists emphasize the irreconcilable contradiction between human needs and cosmic indifference
• Camus explicitly rejected the existentialist label, insisting absurdism was a distinct position

Literary Manifestations

The philosophical difference shows up in how stories end and what characters do:

• Existentialist fiction often features characters actively struggling to create meaning, and sometimes succeeding. There may be a sense of hard-won purpose by the end.
• Absurdist fiction tends to resist resolution. Characters may keep searching, but the search itself is shown to be circular or futile.
• Existentialist works may point toward paths of authenticity (Sartre's characters often face a decisive moment of choice).
• Absurdist works typically leave things open, emphasizing the ongoing nature of the absurd condition.
• Both use unconventional narrative techniques: fragmented timelines, unreliable narrators, stripped-down dialogue.

Key Absurdist Authors

• Albert Camus: Developed absurdism as both a philosophical position (The Myth of Sisyphus) and a literary practice (The Stranger, The Plague)
• Samuel Beckett: His plays and prose (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) push absurdist techniques to their limits
• Eugène Ionesco: Used nonsensical dialogue and impossible situations to expose the absurdity lurking in everyday life
• Franz Kafka: Writing before the movement had a name, Kafka's works (The Metamorphosis, The Trial) prefigured absurdist themes of inexplicable punishment and bureaucratic nightmare
• Joseph Heller: Catch-22 (1961) applied absurdist logic to the insanity of war and military bureaucracy, giving English a new term for an impossible paradox

Existentialist Writing Techniques

Stream of Consciousness

This technique attempts to reproduce the unfiltered flow of a character's thoughts, sensations, and associations. Rather than presenting experience in neat, logical order, it captures the messy reality of how consciousness actually works.

• Reflects the existentialist emphasis on subjective, lived experience over abstract systems
• Allows direct access to a character's existential anxiety, doubt, and internal conflict
• Used extensively by Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway) and James Joyce (Ulysses), though these writers predate existentialism as a movement. Sartre adapted the technique for explicitly existentialist purposes in Nausea.

Unreliable Narrators

An unreliable narrator is one whose account the reader has reason to doubt. This technique connects directly to existentialist ideas about the subjectivity of experience and the difficulty of honest self-knowledge.

• Challenges the reader to question what's "really" happening in the story
• Explores themes of self-deception and bad faith: narrators who lie to themselves about their own motivations
• Camus' The Fall (1956) features a narrator, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, whose confessional monologue gradually reveals layers of self-justification and manipulation
• Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989) uses an unreliable narrator to explore how people construct false narratives to avoid confronting their own failures

Fragmented Narratives

Fragmented or non-linear storytelling disrupts the expectation that events will unfold in orderly sequence. This mirrors the existentialist view that life doesn't come with a built-in plot.

• Forces readers to actively construct meaning from scattered pieces, paralleling the existentialist idea that meaning must be created, not received
• William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929) tells the same story from four different perspectives, each with its own distortions
• Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch (1963) can be read in multiple orders, giving the reader a direct experience of choosing how to make sense of the material

Criticism and Legacy

Critiques of Existentialism

• Nihilism: Critics argue that existentialism, by denying inherent meaning, slides into nihilism and moral relativism. Existentialists counter that creating your own meaning is the opposite of nihilism.
• Individualism: Marxist and communitarian critics charge that existentialism overemphasizes individual experience at the expense of collective action and social structures.
• Pessimism: The movement's focus on anxiety, death, and meaninglessness strikes some as unnecessarily bleak.
• Gender bias: Early existentialist thought was dominated by male perspectives. Beauvoir addressed this, but feminist critics note that Sartre's and Heidegger's frameworks often assumed a male subject.
• Religious objections: Theologians challenge the rejection of divine purpose, though some thinkers (like Kierkegaard and Gabriel Marcel) developed explicitly religious forms of existentialism.

Influence on Contemporary Literature

Existentialist and absurdist ideas remain deeply embedded in contemporary fiction, even when writers don't explicitly identify with the movements:

• Character-driven novels that explore alienation, identity crises, and the search for authenticity owe a direct debt to existentialist fiction
• Postmodern and metamodern writers continue to experiment with techniques pioneered by existentialist and absurdist authors
• Dystopian and speculative fiction (from Philip K. Dick to Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go) frequently raises existential questions about what makes life meaningful
• Autofiction and confessional narratives echo the existentialist emphasis on subjective, first-person experience

Existentialism in Popular Culture

Existentialist themes have spread far beyond literary fiction:

• Films like Blade Runner, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men grapple with existential questions about identity, memory, and meaning
• Graphic novels such as Watchmen and The Sandman explore existential themes through the superhero and fantasy genres
• Video games with branching narratives and moral choices (like The Stanley Parable) put players in existentialist situations where they must create meaning through action
• Music genres from punk to grunge have channeled existentialist attitudes about alienation and authenticity