Existentialism emerged as a philosophical movement in the 19th and 20th centuries, centered on individual existence, freedom, and choice. It pushed back against traditional philosophical systems and religious doctrines by insisting that human subjective experience and personal responsibility matter more than abstract theories about how the world works.
This movement reshaped World Literature II by giving authors new themes and narrative tools. Characters in existentialist fiction grapple with alienation, absurdity, and the search for meaning in a universe that doesn't seem to care whether they find it.
Origins of existentialism
Existentialism didn't appear out of nowhere. It grew from a frustration with philosophical systems that tried to explain everything neatly while ignoring what it actually feels like to be a living, choosing human being. Two 19th-century thinkers laid the groundwork, and two 20th-century French writers brought it into the literary mainstream.
Kierkegaard's influence
Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher writing in the mid-1800s, is often called the "father of existentialism." His central argument was that subjective truth and personal faith matter more than objective, systematic knowledge. He thought the grand philosophical systems of his day (especially Hegel's) were so busy building logical frameworks that they forgot about the individual person living inside them.
Kierkegaard introduced several concepts that became foundational:
- Anxiety as a basic human condition that arises from having to make choices
- Despair as the result of failing to become one's true self
- The "leap of faith" as the idea that some commitments (especially religious ones) can't be reached through reason alone; you have to jump
These ideas appear in works like Fear and Trembling and The Concept of Anxiety, both of which treat the inner life of the individual as the real subject of philosophy.
Nietzsche's contributions
Friedrich Nietzsche, writing in the late 19th century, took existentialist thinking in a more radical direction. His famous declaration that "God is dead" wasn't a celebration but a diagnosis: traditional religious and moral frameworks were losing their hold on Western culture, and nothing had replaced them yet.
This left a vacuum that Nietzsche tried to address through several key ideas:
- Nihilism: the danger that, without God or absolute values, people would conclude that nothing matters
- The Übermensch (often translated as "overman" or "superman"): an ideal of someone who creates their own values through self-overcoming rather than relying on inherited morality
- Will to power: the fundamental human drive toward growth, achievement, and self-mastery
- Eternal recurrence: a thought experiment asking whether you could affirm your life so fully that you'd be willing to live it over and over, identically, forever
Works like Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil pushed future existentialist writers toward individual creativity and a rejection of absolute truths.
Sartre vs Camus
Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus were both French, both active in the mid-20th century, and both deeply shaped by World War II. But they disagreed sharply about what existentialism should look like in practice.
Sartre built a systematic existentialist philosophy. He argued that humans are "condemned to be free," meaning you can never escape the burden of choosing. Every action defines who you are, and you're fully responsible for the consequences. Over time, Sartre embraced Marxism and argued that political engagement was a moral obligation.
Camus resisted being called an existentialist at all. His focus was the absurd, the gap between our desperate need for meaning and the universe's silence in response. Rather than building a philosophical system, Camus argued for individual rebellion against absurdity: keep living, keep creating, refuse to give in.
Their philosophical differences boiled over into a public falling out in 1952, largely triggered by disagreements over Marxism and political violence. Sartre thought systematic political action was necessary; Camus thought systematic philosophies of any kind were dangerous. Both, however, produced novels, plays, and essays that became central texts in World Literature II.
Key existentialist concepts
Existence precedes essence
This is the core claim of existentialism, stated most clearly by Sartre. Traditional philosophy often assumed that humans have a fixed nature or purpose (an "essence") that exists before any individual person does. Existentialism flips this: you exist first, and then you define yourself through your choices and actions.
There's no blueprint for what a human being is supposed to be. You aren't born with a purpose; you have to make one. This places enormous weight on individual responsibility, since you can't blame your nature, your upbringing, or God for who you become.
In literature, this shows up through characters who struggle to define themselves without a script. Meursault in Camus' The Stranger is a striking example: he refuses to perform the emotions society expects, and the consequences are devastating.
Freedom and responsibility
Existentialists argue that humans are fundamentally free. You always have a choice, even when the options are terrible. But this freedom isn't liberating in a simple way; it comes with the full weight of responsibility for what you do.
Bad faith is Sartre's term for the ways people deny their own freedom. You're acting in bad faith when you say "I had no choice" or hide behind a social role ("I was just following orders"). Bad faith is a form of self-deception: pretending you're not free so you don't have to face the anxiety of choosing.
In Sartre's play No Exit, three characters trapped in a room together reveal how they've spent their lives in bad faith, avoiding responsibility for their actions. The play's famous line, "Hell is other people," captures how we use others' judgments as an excuse to avoid confronting ourselves.
Absurdity of life
The absurd isn't just a feeling; it's a specific philosophical concept. It describes the collision between two things: the human need to find meaning and order, and a universe that offers neither. The world isn't hostile; it's indifferent. That indifference is what makes it absurd.
Camus explored this most directly in The Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus is condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity, only to watch it roll back down each time. Camus argues this is a metaphor for the human condition, and his famous conclusion is that "one must imagine Sisyphus happy." The point isn't that suffering is good; it's that you can find meaning in the struggle itself, even without a final reward.
Kafka's The Metamorphosis works in a similar register. Gregor Samsa wakes up as a giant insect, and the most disturbing part isn't the transformation itself but how quickly everyone (including Gregor) tries to normalize it.
Authenticity vs bad faith
Authenticity means living in honest awareness of your freedom, your mortality, and the absence of predetermined meaning. It requires confronting uncomfortable truths about yourself and the world rather than hiding behind comfortable illusions.
Bad faith is its opposite: the denial of your freedom through self-deception. This can take many forms, from blindly following social conventions to convincing yourself that your personality is fixed and unchangeable.
Sartre developed these ideas in Being and Nothingness. In No Exit, the character Garcin desperately wants others to confirm that he's brave, because he can't face the truth about his own cowardice. He's in bad faith because he's looking to others to define him rather than honestly confronting who he is.
Living authentically doesn't mean living comfortably. It often produces existential angst, a deep unease that comes from accepting how much freedom and responsibility you actually carry.
Existentialism in literature
Existentialist philosophy didn't stay in philosophy departments. It found its most powerful expression in fiction, where abstract ideas about freedom, absurdity, and authenticity could be dramatized through characters and situations.
Dostoevsky's underground man
Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (1864) is often called the first existentialist novel, even though it predates the movement by decades. The unnamed narrator, the "underground man," is bitter, contradictory, and painfully self-aware. He rejects the rationalist idea that humans will act in their own best interest if they just think clearly enough.
His central argument is that people will sometimes act against their own interests purely to prove they're free. This insistence on irrational free will, and the psychological suffering that comes with it, anticipates nearly every major existentialist theme. The novel's unflinching look at human consciousness influenced Sartre, Camus, and Kafka alike.
Kafka's alienated protagonists
Franz Kafka's fiction captures the experience of being trapped in systems that make no sense and offer no escape. His protagonists aren't rebels; they're ordinary people caught in extraordinary, incomprehensible situations.
- In The Metamorphosis (1915), Gregor Samsa wakes up transformed into a giant insect. The story explores identity, isolation, and how quickly family bonds dissolve when someone can no longer fulfill their social role.
- In The Trial (1925), Josef K. is arrested and prosecuted by a legal system that never tells him what he's charged with. The novel captures the feeling of powerlessness against bureaucratic forces that seem both all-powerful and completely arbitrary.
The term "Kafkaesque" now describes any situation marked by surreal, nightmarish complexity and a sense that the rules governing your life are both inescapable and unknowable.
Sartre's novels and plays
Sartre used fiction as a laboratory for his philosophical ideas. His major literary works include:
- Nausea (1938): The protagonist Antoine Roquentin experiences a visceral disgust at the sheer fact of existence. Objects, people, even his own body seem grotesquely, pointlessly there. The novel dramatizes what it feels like when the world loses all familiar meaning.
- No Exit (1944): Three dead characters are locked in a room together for eternity. Each one needs something from the others that they can't provide. The play explores how we depend on other people to define us, and how that dependence becomes a trap.
- The Age of Reason (1945): The protagonist Mathieu tries to preserve his personal freedom at all costs, only to discover that avoiding commitment is itself a kind of trap.
Sartre's writing is heavy on psychological introspection and philosophical dialogue. His characters don't just face problems; they think about what it means to face problems.
Themes in existentialist writing
Alienation and isolation
Alienation is one of the most recognizable features of existentialist fiction. Characters feel disconnected from society, from other people, and sometimes from themselves. This isn't just loneliness; it's a deeper sense that the social world operates according to rules that don't make sense or don't apply to you.
This alienation takes different forms: social (Meursault's inability to perform expected emotions in The Stranger), physical (Gregor Samsa's literal transformation into something inhuman), and psychological (the underground man's retreat from the world). Writers often use techniques like stream of consciousness and unreliable narration to put readers inside the alienated mind.
Confronting death
Existentialist writers treat death not as something to avoid thinking about but as the fact that gives life its urgency. If you're going to die, then your time is limited, and the question of how to spend it becomes unavoidable.
Death functions as a catalyst in these works. In Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a dying man realizes he's spent his entire life following social conventions instead of living authentically. In Camus' The Plague, an epidemic forces an entire city to confront mortality, and the characters' responses reveal what they truly value. The point isn't that death is terrifying (though it often is); it's that awareness of death strips away comfortable illusions.
Search for meaning
If the universe doesn't come with built-in meaning, then finding or creating purpose becomes the central human task. Existentialist characters are often shown in the middle of this struggle, testing different approaches and frequently failing.
Roquentin in Sartre's Nausea tries art, relationships, and intellectual work, finding each one hollow. Meursault in The Stranger seems not to search at all, which is part of what makes him so unsettling to the people around him. The existentialist position isn't that meaning is impossible, but that it has to be actively created rather than passively received from religion, tradition, or society.
Individual vs society
Existentialist fiction frequently stages a conflict between the individual who wants to live authentically and the society that demands conformity. Social norms, institutions, and authority figures all pressure characters to play predetermined roles rather than define themselves.
Camus explored this tension directly in The Rebel, arguing that rebellion against absurdity is a fundamental human response. Sartre's play The Flies retells the Greek myth of Orestes, who defies the gods and accepts full responsibility for his actions. In both cases, the individual's refusal to submit to external authority is presented as the beginning of authentic existence, even when it comes at great personal cost.
Existentialist philosophy
Being-in-the-world
Martin Heidegger introduced this concept in Being and Time (1927) to describe something that sounds obvious but has deep implications: you never exist in isolation. You're always already embedded in a world of relationships, tools, meanings, and other people.
This challenges the traditional philosophical picture of a detached mind observing an external world. For Heidegger, you don't first exist and then encounter the world; your existence is your engagement with the world. This idea influenced existentialist literature by shifting attention from abstract ideas to characters' concrete, lived experiences and their entanglement with their surroundings.
Facticity and transcendence
These two concepts describe the tension at the heart of human existence:
- Facticity is everything about your situation that you didn't choose: where and when you were born, your body, your mortality, the historical moment you live in.
- Transcendence is your ability to go beyond those given facts through choices, projects, and imagination.
You're never purely one or the other. You can't ignore your facticity (pretending your circumstances don't matter is bad faith), but you also can't reduce yourself to it (claiming you're entirely determined by your circumstances is also bad faith). The tension between the two is where existentialist drama lives. Characters like Mathieu in The Age of Reason struggle with exactly this: how to exercise freedom within real constraints.
Existential angst
Angst (sometimes translated as anxiety or dread) is the emotional response to recognizing your own freedom. It's not fear of any specific threat. It's the dizziness that comes from realizing that nothing forces you to be one thing rather than another, and that you alone are responsible for what you become.
Kierkegaard described it as the "dizziness of freedom." Sartre connected it to the awareness that at every moment, you could do something completely different from what you're doing. This isn't a disorder to be cured; it's a basic feature of being human. In literature, angst shows up as the psychological turmoil characters experience when comfortable illusions fall away, as in Roquentin's nausea or Camus' depiction of Sisyphus at the moment the boulder rolls back down.
Radical freedom
Sartre's concept of radical freedom is one of existentialism's most provocative claims: you are always free, no matter your circumstances. Even a prisoner chooses how to respond to imprisonment. There are no valid excuses, no deterministic forces that fully explain your behavior.
This doesn't mean you can do anything you want (your facticity is real), but it means you always choose your attitude and your actions within your situation. The weight of this idea is enormous: if you're always free, you're always responsible. Characters in existentialist fiction often buckle under this weight. Orestes in Sartre's The Flies embraces radical freedom by accepting full responsibility for killing his mother's murderer, refusing to let the gods or fate take the blame.
Critiques of existentialism
Existentialism attracted serious criticism from multiple directions. Understanding these critiques helps you see both the strengths and the blind spots of the movement.
Marxist perspectives
Marxist critics argued that existentialism's focus on individual experience ignored the material conditions (economics, class, labor) that shape what choices are actually available to people. Radical freedom sounds compelling in the abstract, but it means something very different to a factory worker than to a Parisian intellectual.
The Marxist charge was that existentialism was essentially a bourgeois philosophy: it treated freedom as a purely internal matter while ignoring the social and economic structures that constrain real people's lives. Sartre himself was influenced by this critique and spent his later career trying to reconcile existentialism with Marxism, arguing in Critique of Dialectical Reason that both individual freedom and material conditions matter.
Feminist interpretations
Early existentialism was largely a male conversation, and feminist critics pointed out that its supposedly universal claims about freedom often didn't account for the specific constraints women faced. If society systematically denies women opportunities, then telling them they're "radically free" can feel more like victim-blaming than liberation.
Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) is the most important response here. Beauvoir used existentialist tools to analyze women's oppression, arguing that women had been treated as the "Other" and denied the chance to define themselves. Her famous claim that "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" is a direct application of "existence precedes essence" to gender. Her work opened the door for existentialist feminism and influenced later writers like Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood.
Postmodern challenges
Postmodern thinkers questioned some of existentialism's foundational assumptions. If existentialism says you should live "authentically," that assumes there's a true self to be authentic to. Postmodernists argued that the self is fragmented, socially constructed, and shaped by language and culture in ways that make the idea of a unified, authentic identity suspect.
They also challenged existentialism's tendency toward grand claims about "the human condition," arguing that such universal statements erase important differences of culture, history, and identity. Writers like Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges explored these postmodern themes, creating fiction where stable identity and coherent meaning are deliberately undermined.
Legacy and influence
Impact on 20th century thought
Existentialism's reach extended well beyond philosophy and literature:
- Psychology: Existential psychology and Viktor Frankl's logotherapy (developed partly from his experience in Nazi concentration camps) drew directly on existentialist ideas about meaning-making
- Theology: Christian existentialism (Paul Tillich, Karl Barth) and "death of God" theology engaged with Nietzsche's and Kierkegaard's challenges to traditional religion
- Politics: Existential Marxism and certain strands of anarchism drew on existentialist ideas about freedom and responsibility
- Art: Abstract expressionism and the Theatre of the Absurd (Beckett, Ionesco) translated existentialist themes into visual art and performance
Existentialism in popular culture
Existentialist ideas filtered into mainstream culture throughout the 20th century. Film directors like Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries) and later Woody Allen built entire careers around existential questions of meaning, death, and identity.
The Beat Generation writers (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg) absorbed existentialist themes of authenticity and rebellion against conformity. Musicians from The Cure to Talking Heads explored alienation and the search for meaning. Graphic novelists like Alan Moore (Watchmen) and Neil Gaiman (The Sandman) used the medium to examine moral responsibility and the construction of identity.
Contemporary relevance
Existentialist questions haven't gone away. If anything, issues of identity, authenticity, and meaning have become more pressing in an era of social media, where people constantly perform versions of themselves for an audience. The existentialist framework gives you tools for thinking about what it means to live authentically when so much of life is mediated by technology and shaped by algorithms.
Contemporary authors like Haruki Murakami and the late David Foster Wallace have engaged with existentialist themes, exploring alienation, the search for meaning, and the difficulty of genuine human connection. Existentialism also continues to inform debates in ethics, neuroscience (free will vs. determinism), and political philosophy about personal responsibility in an interconnected world.