Absurdist fiction

Based on Wikipedia: Absurdist fiction

Imagine waking up one morning to discover you've transformed into a giant insect. Your family is horrified. You can't go to work. You can't explain what happened because you don't know. Eventually, you waste away and die, and your family feels mostly relief. There is no redemption, no deeper meaning, no lesson learned.

This is Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, and it captures something essential about absurdist fiction: the refusal to offer the comfort of meaning.

The Universe Doesn't Care About Your Story Arc

Traditional fiction operates on an implicit promise. Events build toward something. Characters learn and grow. Suffering has purpose. The villain gets punished. The hero's journey concludes with transformation. Even tragedies offer catharsis—the sense that this meant something.

Absurdist fiction breaks that promise deliberately.

Characters in absurdist works find themselves trapped in situations where the normal rules don't apply. They search for meaning and find none. They take actions that lead nowhere. They wait for explanations that never come. The universe of these stories operates with a kind of cosmic indifference that mirrors what many philosophers believe about actual existence.

This isn't the same as randomness or chaos, though absurdist works can certainly be chaotic. It's something more unsettling: a world that seems like it should make sense but stubbornly refuses to. The characters can see the outline of logic, the suggestion of purpose, but when they reach for it, their hands close on empty air.

Born from the Wreckage

The absurdist movement didn't emerge from nowhere. It crawled out of the rubble of the twentieth century's first half, when Europe had thoroughly demonstrated humanity's capacity for mechanized slaughter, genocide, and destruction on a scale previously unimaginable.

Before World War One, Western civilization generally believed in progress. Science was improving life. Democracy was spreading. The great powers might squabble, but surely civilization had advanced beyond true barbarism. Then came the trenches, the gas attacks, the senseless death of millions. And just when people thought they'd seen the worst, World War Two delivered the Holocaust, the atomic bomb, and the revelation that industrial efficiency could be applied to extermination.

How do you write meaningful fiction after Auschwitz? What story could possibly wrap a neat bow around the systematic murder of six million people?

Absurdist fiction was one answer. Instead of pretending that narrative could contain such horror, these writers acknowledged that some things simply don't make sense—and maybe nothing ever did.

The Philosophers Behind the Curtain

Two intellectual traditions fed directly into absurdist fiction: existentialism and nihilism. Understanding the difference between them helps explain what absurdist writers were actually trying to do.

Nihilism, in its starkest form, holds that life has no inherent meaning whatsoever. The universe is indifferent. Human values are arbitrary constructions. Nothing matters objectively. This sounds bleak, and it can be, but nihilism doesn't necessarily tell you what to do with this information.

Existentialism starts from a similar premise—there's no pre-given meaning to existence—but arrives at a different conclusion. If meaning doesn't exist inherently, humans must create it themselves. You are "condemned to be free," as Jean-Paul Sartre put it. The absence of cosmic purpose doesn't eliminate responsibility; it amplifies it. Every choice becomes entirely yours.

Absurdism occupies the space between these positions. It acknowledges the human need for meaning while recognizing the universe's silence on the matter. This creates what Albert Camus called "the absurd"—not meaninglessness itself, but the collision between our desperate search for meaning and the world's refusal to provide it.

Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher writing in the mid-1800s, gets credit as the "father of existentialism" and used the term "absurd" in a specifically religious context. For Kierkegaard, the absurd was the point where rational argument for faith runs out, but faith persists anyway. You can't prove God exists through logic, yet believers believe. This leap beyond reason—embracing something precisely because it defies rational justification—was Kierkegaard's absurd.

Friedrich Nietzsche, writing a few decades later, proclaimed that "God is dead"—not as a celebration but as a diagnosis. Western civilization had relied on religious frameworks for moral guidance and existential purpose, but Nietzsche saw this foundation crumbling. Science and rationalism had eroded faith, but nothing had replaced the meaning structures religion provided. People were adrift, clutching at values they no longer truly believed in.

Camus and the Happy Sisyphus

Albert Camus gave absurdism its most famous image in his 1942 essay "The Myth of Sisyphus."

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a king who cheated death twice and was punished for eternity: he must roll a boulder up a mountain, only to watch it roll back down the moment it reaches the top. Forever. The task never ends, never accomplishes anything, never changes.

Most people read this as a story about futile punishment. Camus read it differently.

He asked: what happens in Sisyphus's mind as he walks back down the mountain to start again? In that moment, Sisyphus becomes conscious of his fate. He sees the absurdity clearly. And yet he continues. For Camus, this consciousness transforms the punishment. By accepting the absurd rather than fleeing from it—through suicide, or through false hope in religion or ideology—Sisyphus achieves a kind of freedom.

"One must imagine Sisyphus happy," Camus concluded.

This isn't optimism in any conventional sense. It's something stranger: the argument that confronting meaninglessness honestly is better than the alternatives. You don't defeat the absurd by finding hidden meaning. You defeat it by refusing to be defeated—by continuing to push the boulder while knowing it will always roll back down.

Kafka's World Gone Wrong

Franz Kafka died in 1924, before absurdism had a name, but his work became foundational to the movement. He wrote in German in Prague, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a Jewish man in a predominantly Christian society, an insurance bureaucrat who wrote fiction in his spare time. His sense of alienation wasn't theoretical.

The Trial, published posthumously in 1925, follows a man named Josef K. who is arrested one morning. He's never told what crime he's committed. He can't find out who's accusing him or what evidence exists against him. The court operates by rules that seem to exist but remain perpetually unclear. Josef K. spends the novel trying to navigate this system, hiring lawyers, seeking help, growing increasingly desperate—and none of it matters. The ending, which I won't spoil, offers no resolution.

What makes Kafka genuinely disturbing isn't the strangeness of his situations. It's how familiar they feel. Anyone who has dealt with a bureaucracy, received contradictory instructions from different officials, or been caught in a system that seems designed to prevent rather than solve problems recognizes something in Kafka's world. The word "Kafkaesque" entered the English language precisely because so many people knew exactly what it meant.

Kafka himself described his style as blending the absurd, the surreal, and the mundane. The horror comes not from obvious nightmares but from slightly wrong versions of ordinary life—offices that work almost like real offices, courts that follow almost-logical procedures, families that react to impossible situations with petty annoyance rather than appropriate shock.

Waiting for Something That Never Comes

Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which premiered in Paris in 1953, became the defining work of absurdist theater. The premise sounds like a joke: two men, Vladimir and Estragon, wait by a tree for someone named Godot. They talk. They argue. They encounter other characters. Godot never arrives. They agree to leave but don't move.

That's it. That's the whole play.

When it first opened, audiences were baffled and sometimes hostile. What was this supposed to mean? Where was the plot? Why doesn't anything happen? One famous early review described it as "a play in which nothing happens, twice"—since the two acts essentially repeat the same non-events.

But something does happen in Waiting for Godot: time passes. Characters exist. They fill their hours with games, conversations, cruelties, and small kindnesses. They endure. The play forces audiences to sit with what most narratives skip over—the vast stretches of life where nothing meaningful occurs, where we're just waiting for something that may never come.

Beckett, an Irishman who wrote in both English and French, brought a quality of dark humor to absurdism that distinguished it from mere bleakness. His characters are often funny, even as their situations are hopeless. They make jokes about their suffering. They bicker like an old married couple. The comedy doesn't undercut the tragedy—it coexists with it, because that's how actual human beings operate even in the worst circumstances.

The Theater of the Absurd

In 1960, a literary critic named Martin Esslin published an essay that gave this theatrical movement its name: the Theater of the Absurd. He grouped together playwrights who shared certain tendencies without necessarily coordinating or even agreeing with each other.

The core playwrights Esslin identified were Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Arthur Adamov, and Jean Genet. Later editions added Harold Pinter. Other writers associated with the movement include Tom Stoppard, Edward Albee, and Fernando Arrabal.

What united these playwrights wasn't a manifesto or a set of rules. It was a shared suspicion of conventional theatrical structures. Traditional plays have rising action, climax, and resolution. Characters want things and take actions to get them. Dialogue advances the plot and reveals character. Audiences learn something or feel catharsis.

Absurdist theater subverts all of this. Plot movement becomes arbitrary or circular. Characters behave in ways that seem unmotivated. Dialogue often fails to communicate anything—people talk past each other, repeat themselves endlessly, or produce streams of non sequiturs. The set might be sparse, unchanging, or actively hostile to normal perception.

Eugène Ionesco's The Bald Soprano from 1950 illustrates this perfectly. A married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, sit in their English home making conversation. They discuss their dinner, their friends, their lives—in language that sounds like normal speech but conveys almost nothing. Eventually another couple arrives, the Martins, who gradually realize through a long, absurd process of deduction that they are in fact married to each other. The play builds to a crescendo of nonsense and then simply stops, with the final scene repeating the opening scene with the couples switched.

Ionesco called The Bald Soprano an "anti-play." He had written it partly as a parody of language textbooks, those stilted dialogues about pens on tables and pleasant weather. What he discovered was that stripping language of real communication exposed something unsettling about how humans actually interact.

Not Just European, Not Just Old

While absurdism flowered in mid-century Europe, its roots and branches spread much further.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Russian novelist of the 1800s, anticipated absurdist themes in works like Notes from Underground, where the narrator refuses rational self-interest and embraces perversity specifically because it asserts his freedom. Nikolai Gogol, another Russian, wrote stories in the 1800s featuring runaway noses and other impossibilities treated with bureaucratic seriousness.

In Japan, Kōbō Abe wrote novels like The Woman in the Dunes about a man trapped in a sand pit with a widow, forced to shovel sand endlessly to prevent their house from being buried. The situation is impossible, the metaphor is obvious, and the prose remains utterly matter-of-fact. Osamu Dazai explored absurdist themes through the lens of Japanese society's rigid expectations and the impossibility of authentic existence within them.

Haruki Murakami, one of the most widely-read contemporary authors, regularly incorporates absurdist elements into otherwise realistic fiction. Characters fall down wells into other dimensions. Cats disappear and reappear. Towns lose their shadows. These impossibilities intrude without explanation and are often accepted by characters with minimal fuss.

In American literature, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 from 1961 gave the English language a term for absurd circular logic. The novel follows a World War Two bombardier who wants to be declared insane so he doesn't have to fly more missions. But there's a catch: anyone who wants to avoid combat duty isn't insane, because that's a perfectly rational desire. Only someone truly insane would want to fly combat missions, and if they want to fly, they don't need to be grounded. It's impossible to win.

Kurt Vonnegut blended absurdism with science fiction, creating works like Slaughterhouse-Five where the horror of the Dresden firebombing—which Vonnegut witnessed as a prisoner of war—is processed through time travel and alien abduction. The absurd elements don't diminish the historical horror; they're the only way the narrator can approach it at all.

Absurdism Isn't Nonsense

A common misunderstanding conflates absurdist fiction with simple randomness or surreal imagery. While absurdist works can certainly be strange, and some overlap exists with literary nonsense, the genres have different purposes.

Nonsense literature—Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, for instance—delights in illogic for its own sake. The pleasure comes from the cleverness of the wordplay, the whimsy of the impossible, the liberation from making sense. It's playful.

Absurdist fiction uses illogic differently. The strangeness isn't purely playful; it's diagnostic. It points at something true about existence that realistic fiction struggles to capture. When Gregor Samsa wakes up as an insect, Kafka isn't interested in the fantasy scenario. He's interested in how the family reacts, how quickly they adapt, how their concern for Gregor transforms into resentment and then relief at his death. The impossible premise reveals possible truths about human relationships.

Similarly, absurdist humor—which has influenced everything from Monty Python to Adult Swim—relies on non sequiturs and violated expectations, but in absurdist fiction proper, the humor serves a larger purpose. It creates discomfort. It refuses to let readers settle into easy emotion. You laugh, but the laugh doesn't release tension; it amplifies the unease.

The Brain Likes a Puzzle

Here's a curious finding: reading absurdist fiction might actually make you smarter, at least temporarily.

In 2009, psychologists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of British Columbia published research showing that test subjects who read Kafka demonstrated improved pattern recognition afterward. When people struggled to find coherence in a fragmented story, their brains apparently compensated by becoming better at detecting patterns elsewhere.

The researchers' hypothesis: encountering meaninglessness triggers a threat response. The brain doesn't like not understanding things. So it ramps up its pattern-detection capabilities, becoming temporarily more alert to structure and regularity in subsequent tasks.

This suggests something interesting about why absurdist fiction persists despite being, by design, unsatisfying in conventional terms. The experience of struggling with it may be doing something useful—exercising cognitive muscles that comfortable, coherent narratives leave dormant.

On Screen

Absurdism translated surprisingly well to film, perhaps because cinema can make the impossible visually concrete in ways that prose only describes.

Luis Buñuel, working with Salvador Dalí, created Un Chien Andalou in 1929, a short film famous for its opening sequence of an eye being sliced by a razor and its aggressive rejection of narrative logic. Buñuel spent decades making films that mixed social critique with surreal imagery, often targeting the Catholic Church and bourgeois society with equal venom.

Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove from 1964 treated nuclear annihilation as farce. The film follows various military and political figures as they stumble toward the end of civilization through a series of absurd miscommunications, petty grudges, and ideological blindness. The comedy doesn't soften the horror—it makes the horror more unbearable because you're laughing while the world ends.

The Coen brothers have built a career on absurdist crime stories where violence erupts unpredictably, plans go wrong in unexpected ways, and cosmic irony seems to govern events. Fargo, No Country for Old Men, and A Serious Man all feature characters trying to make sense of senseless situations.

More recently, the filmmaking duo known as Daniels created Everything Everywhere All at Once, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2023. The film throws its protagonist through infinite parallel universes, including ones where humans evolved with hot dogs for fingers, while maintaining an emotional core about family disconnection and the search for meaning. It's absurdist in the technical sense—the multiverse operates according to rules that seem to exist but remain fundamentally arbitrary—while also being genuinely moving.

David Lynch stands as perhaps the purest absurdist filmmaker, creating works like Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive, and the television series Twin Peaks that resist interpretation while generating intense emotional responses. Lynch refuses to explain his films because explanation would defeat the purpose. The viewer's bafflement isn't a failure to understand; it's the understanding itself.

The Opposite of Absurdism

To understand what absurdist fiction is, it helps to consider what it's arguing against.

The opposite of absurdism might be called providential fiction—stories where events happen for reasons, where suffering teaches lessons, where the arc of narrative bends toward justice or at least meaning. This includes most religious literature, where divine purpose underlies events even when that purpose isn't immediately clear. It also includes most commercial fiction, which tends to deliver the satisfactions readers expect: the mystery solved, the couple united, the hero triumphant.

Victorian literature, against which early absurdists explicitly rebelled, often carried strong moral messages. Characters who behaved badly came to bad ends. Characters who persevered through hardship were rewarded. The novel functioned partly as moral instruction, showing readers how to live properly and what consequences followed from improper choices.

Romanticism, the movement that dominated European literature in the early 1800s, offered a different kind of meaning: the individual's emotions and experiences were themselves significant, worthy of artistic attention, connected to nature and the sublime. The Romantic hero might suffer, but the suffering was beautiful and profound.

Absurdism rejects both the Victorian moral universe and the Romantic glorification of individual feeling. Suffering isn't educational. Emotion isn't transcendent. Things happen because they happen. The universe has no opinion about your story arc.

Living in the Absurd

Absurdist fiction doesn't tell you what to do with its insights. This is deliberate. A work that concluded with clear instructions—"therefore, do this"—would betray its own premises. Meaning can't be imposed from outside.

But the movement does suggest some attitudes worth considering.

First: honesty. Absurdism insists on looking directly at the meaninglessness rather than constructing elaborate justifications or comforting illusions. This can feel brutal, but there's a strange liberation in it. You don't have to pretend anymore.

Second: persistence. Sisyphus keeps pushing the boulder. Vladimir and Estragon keep waiting. The characters in Kafka keep trying to navigate systems that will never make sense. Absurdist heroes, if they can be called heroes, are distinguished not by their victories but by their refusal to quit even when victory is impossible.

Third: humor. The absurdist sensibility finds something funny in the cosmic joke, even if the laugh catches in your throat. This isn't denial or deflection. It's recognition that the alternative to laughing at meaninglessness is being crushed by it.

Fourth: solidarity. If we're all stuck in the same absurd condition, there's something connecting us. The stranger sitting next to you on the bus is also pushing a boulder up a mountain. The two of you might not be able to help each other reach the top—there is no top—but you can at least acknowledge each other's presence.

Still Relevant, Still Uncomfortable

Absurdist fiction emerged from the specific traumas of the mid-twentieth century, but its concerns haven't become dated. If anything, contemporary life offers new varieties of absurdity for the genre to explore.

Climate change presents an absurdist scenario on a planetary scale: humanity collectively doing something it knows is catastrophic, unable to stop even though the solution is technically possible. The system continues because it continues. The boulder rolls back down.

Social media creates environments where communication fragments into performances, where context collapses, where people talk past each other at increasing volumes. Ionesco's depiction of language failing to communicate feels prescient.

Bureaucratic systems have grown more complex since Kafka's time, not less. Anyone who has navigated health insurance, immigration law, or corporate customer service has experienced the sensation of rules that seem to exist but remain perpetually unclear, of decisions made by authorities who cannot be reached, of efforts that lead nowhere.

The genre persists because the absurd persists. As long as humans search for meaning in a universe that offers none, as long as we build systems that trap us, as long as we struggle to communicate across the gaps between our individual consciousnesses, absurdist fiction will have something to say—even if what it says is that there's nothing to say.

One must imagine the reader continuing anyway.