Absurdist fiction is a genre of novels, plays, poems, films, or other media that focuses on the experiences of characters in situations where they cannot find any inherent purpose in life, most often represented by ultimately meaningless actions and events that call into question the certainty of existential concepts such as truth or value.
Absurdist fiction is a reaction against the surge in Romanticism in Paris in the 1830s, the collapse of religious tradition in Germany, and the societal and philosophical revolution led by the expressions of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche.
[4] The integral characteristic of absurdist fiction involves the experience of the struggle to find an intrinsic purpose in life, depicted by characters in their display of meaningless actions in the futile events they take part in.
Absurdism as a philosophical movement is an extension of, or divergence from, Existentialism, which focuses on the pointlessness of mankind and specifically the emotional angst and anxiety present when the existence of purpose is challenged.
[10] The absurdist fiction also does not seek to appeal to the so-called collective unconscious as it is fiercely individualistic and almost exclusively focuses on exploring an individual's or a being's subjective feelings of its existence.
[11][12] Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Albert Camus, Saul Bellow, Donald Barthelme and Cormac McCarthy are considered to be the most well-known composers of absurdist fiction.
[15] Samuel Beckett was also an early absurdist; an Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), known as the "father of existentialism", was a prolific Danish writer who opposed conventional boundaries of philosophy, psychology, theology, fiction and literary criticism.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a cultural critic, composer, poet, philologist, and a Latin and Greek egg scholar who also yielded profound inspiration in Western philosophy and modern intellectual history.
His interest in nihilism, in particular his views on Christianity and God, alludes to the traditions of the Western world in their reliance on religion as a "moral compass" and source of meaning.
Camus elucidates his own symbolism as a representation of the human condition in a world where we face the universal difficulty of making sense of events; however instead of turning to suicide that we must reconcile with the "elusive feeling of absurdity" and endure it to the best of our abilities.
Kafka employs erroneous alliteration and literary manipulation to compose a nonsensical, existentialist novel that exemplifies the inhumanity, alienation and absurdity persisting in the modern world alongside the impacts of totalitarianism, injustice and bureaucracy as a whole.
[27] Martin Esslin named the four defining playwrights of the Theatre of the Absurd movement as Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet.
Other writers that are also associated with this movement by Esslin and other critics are Tom Stoppard, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Fernando Arrabal, Edward Albee, Boris Vian, and Jean Tardieu.
Movement of the plot is arbitrary; characters of absurdist theatre are mostly unfamiliar and strangely motivated, scenery is often unrecognizable and sometimes unchanging or desolate, and dialogue appears to be nonsense.
Romanian-French playwright Eugène Ionesco's The Bald Soprano (1950) is a dominating play central to the Theatre of the Absurd, its "dreamlike symphony of nonsensical speech and disjointed associations expose how hopeless human communication is".
Ionesco's engagement with existentialism is also characteristic of absurdist theatre, and distinct in the utilisation of the seemingly ridiculous English language and society's unwillingness to communicate with each other.
[32] Ionesco's The Bald Soprano encompasses mankind's inability to engage in communication in a purposeless world, reiterating the influence of Existentialism on Absurdist Fiction and how this presents in texts within the Theatre of the Absurd literary genre.
Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1953), an originally French text, is an absurdist theatre drama that is described as one of the most important plays of the 20th century[33] despite its early reception.
"[35] Beckett's desolate universe in his play is rendered by Absurdist techniques; an unchanging landscape, characters subjected to random and whimsical acts of violence with cyclical discourse.