The Hermit (novel)

The Hermit (French title Le Solitaire), published in 1973, is the only novel written by the Romanian-French absurdist playwright Eugène Ionesco.

He responds to this sudden wealth by quitting the job he has been working at for 15 years, and moving to a very nice apartment in the suburbs, where he bathes and shaves, reads the newspaper, eats lunch, dinner, drinks too much, thinks about death, and then attempts to sleep.

When violence breaks out near his home, he joins the revolutionaries in the street—and imagines it is a demonstration of his own inner catastrophe, in which unexpected fortune has only led to loneliness, despair, and madness.

Edmund White, reviewing The Hermit in The New York Times in 1974 says that in this novel Ionesco elaborates "with great skill" a theme that has occurred in some of his plays—a fear of death.

So I move, I move, to and fro throughout the house; I light and I run.White suggests that "It is death that makes all human activities, not just bourgeois manners, absurd; in the light of mortality every motive looks mad", and that Ionesco has created a little fool, who inherited a lot of money, and who then attempts to solve problems of humanity, such as "alienation, the nature of the infinite, existential dread, determinism and so on.