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Existential Crisis and the Absurd: Comparing Camus’s Philosophy with American Postwar Fiction
Author(s): Lavanya SinghAbstract
The existential condition of human beings has long been a subject of literary and philosophical inquiry. In the twentieth century the trauma of war the decline of traditional belief systems and the rise of individual alienation gave rise to a complex literary and intellectual environment in which questions of meaning absurdity and redemption emerged as dominant themes. The philosophy of Albert Camus particularly his notion of the absurd offered a powerful framework to understand the fundamental disharmony between human yearning for meaning and the silent indifferent universe. While Camus articulated this dilemma through his philosophical essays and fiction particularly in The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger American postwar literature echoed these anxieties in a cultural context shaped by urban dislocation consumerism racial segregation and the Cold War.