Existentialism & the Absurd Part 9: Literature, Theater & Film

The Existential Novel

Long before "existentialism" was a label, the existential novel existed. Certain works of fiction stage the questions — about freedom, despair, meaning, guilt — with a vividness that argument cannot match. Sartre himself maintained that the novel was the proper genre for existential thought, because only fiction could show a free consciousness making itself in real time, in a particular situation, with particular others.

Dostoevsky & Kafka

We met both writers in Part 6, but their place in this story bears repeating. Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground (1864) is, by wide consensus, the first existential novel: its narrator's furious refusal to be calculated, predicted, or improved by enlightenment progress is the literary inauguration of the modern existential subject. Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880) carry the project further, through extreme cases — Raskolnikov's "extraordinary man" theory and its catastrophe, Ivan's "if God does not exist," Father Zosima's answer, the Grand Inquisitor.

Kafka — Czech-Jewish, German-speaking, dead at 40 of tuberculosis — invented an absurd that was not cosmic but bureaucratic. The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926) describe systems whose rules cannot be learned, authorities who cannot be reached, and accusations that cannot be answered. Reading Kafka in 2026 is uncanny precisely because his nightmares now describe customer-service phone trees, immigration appeals, and content-moderation deplatformings.

Camus's Fiction

Camus's three major novels are arguably better introductions to his thought than his essays. We met The Stranger (1942) in Part 4. The Plague (1947) we met as the bridge from absurd to revolt. His third great novel, The Fall (La Chute, 1956), is in some ways the most disturbing.

Sartre's Theater

Sartre wrote nine plays. They are, in many ways, his most accessible work — and the form was deliberate. He believed theater could give philosophical ideas a public, popular embodiment that academic prose could not.

No Exit (Huis Clos, 1944)

Sartre's most famous play. Three strangers — Joseph Garcin (a coward and womanizer), Inès Serrano (a sadistic lesbian), and Estelle Rigault (a vain infanticide) — are ushered into a windowless drawing room with Second Empire furniture, locked in by a valet, and slowly realize they are dead. They expect torture devices. There are none.

Their hell is each other. Inès needs Estelle's love, who needs Garcin's love, who needs Inès's respect — and none of these can be granted. They are each other's mirrors, and each mirror tells an unwelcome truth. The play ends with Garcin's recognition: "Pas besoin de gril, l'enfer, c'est les Autres." ("No need for hot pokers. Hell is — other people.") We discussed the meaning of the line in Part 3; the play is its definitive expression.

The Flies & Dirty Hands

Les Mouches (The Flies, 1943) was staged in Nazi-occupied Paris and is, beneath its Greek mythological surface, a coded call for resistance. Orestes returns to Argos, a city polluted by guilt and feasted on by flies, and decides to take on the burden of a free act — killing the usurpers Aegisthus and Clytemnestra — without any divine sanction. He freely chooses guilt, and so wins his freedom from the city's diseased remorse. The Vichy censors missed the politics; the audiences did not.

Les Mains sales (Dirty Hands, 1948) takes on the question of political violence. Hugo, a young intellectual sent to assassinate a Communist Party leader who has compromised with bourgeois forces, finds his target both more human and more politically wise than he expected. The play's central question — can one act morally in a corrupted political situation without dirtying one's hands? — preoccupied Sartre for the rest of his life.

Theater of the Absurd

The phrase "theater of the absurd" was coined by the critic Martin Esslin in 1961 to describe a wave of post-war playwrights — chiefly Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter — whose work staged the existential and absurdist insights in dramatic form. Where Sartre's plays argued, theater of the absurd showed by collapsing argument itself into nonsense, repetition, and silence.

Beckett: Waiting for Godot (1953)

Samuel Beckett's En attendant Godot is perhaps the most famous play of the 20th century. Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait by a tree on a country road for someone called Godot, who never arrives. They argue, they consider hanging themselves, they entertain themselves with vaudeville bits, they are joined briefly by the bullying Pozzo and his mute slave Lucky, and then they wait again. A boy arrives at the end of each act to say Mr. Godot will not come today but will surely come tomorrow.

The play famously contains the stage direction: "They do not move." It says nothing explicit about meaning, freedom, or the Absurd; it simply enacts them. Vivian Mercier's review summed it up: a play in which "nothing happens, twice." And yet the audience is left, after two hours, stripped of its usual defenses against the question Beckett never asks aloud.

Beckett's later plays push further: Endgame (1957), Krapp's Last Tape (1958), Happy Days (1961), and finally pieces like Not I (1972) — a single illuminated mouth in a black void. The trajectory is a stripping-down toward the bare existential predicament.

Ionesco: The Bald Soprano

Romanian-born French playwright Eugène Ionesco wrote his first play, La Cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano, 1950), after trying to learn English from a phrasebook and noticing how absurd ordinary phrases became when stripped from context. The play stages a middle-class English household reciting platitudes that gradually break down into pure noise. There is no bald soprano in the play.

Rhinoceros (1959) is more politically explicit. The inhabitants of a French town gradually transform, one by one, into rhinoceroses; only the ordinary, unheroic Bérenger refuses to convert. Written in the shadow of European fascism, it is a parable of conformist surrender — Heidegger's das Man taken to the point of literal monstrosity — and the lonely cost of refusing it.

Existentialism on Film

If the novel and the play were the existential genres of the first half of the 20th century, cinema took over as the existential medium of the second.

Bergman: The Seventh Seal (1957)

Swedish director Ingmar Bergman made existential film canonical. Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal) is set during the Black Death, where the medieval knight Antonius Block, returning from the Crusades, is met on a beach by Death personified in a black hood. Block bargains for time by challenging Death to a chess match, and uses the borrowed days to seek a meaningful act in a world that no longer answers his prayers.

Bergman's films from the late 1950s and 1960s — Wild Strawberries (1957), The Virgin Spring (1960), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1963) — together compose the most sustained cinematic engagement with the silence of God, the weight of mortality, and the search for meaning ever made. Bergman himself called the trilogy "chamber works," and they have the intimacy and intensity of late Beethoven.

Tarkovsky's Long Time

Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky built a cinema of the long take, in which time itself becomes the subject. Stalker (1979) — three men crossing a forbidden "Zone" in search of a room that grants one's deepest wish — is an existential parable of belief, doubt, and what we are actually seeking. The Mirror (1975) and Nostalghia (1983) layer memory, longing, and faith into images of an almost liturgical patience.

Where Bergman's existentialism is verbal and theological, Tarkovsky's is contemplative and material — in the dripping water, the wind in the grass, the slowly burning candle Otto carries across the empty pool in Nostalghia's climactic scene.

Contemporary Cinema

The existential film never went away. Recent decades give us:

• Charlie Kaufman — Synecdoche, New York (2008), I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020). Films about consciousness, identity, time, and the impossibility of producing a "complete" account of one's life.
• Terrence Malick — The Tree of Life (2011), A Hidden Life (2019). Heideggerian cinema in which Being itself is the protagonist; a Catholic existentialism of grace and conscience.
• The Daniels — Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). A multiverse adventure that is also a Camusian meditation on absurdity, nihilism, and the choice to be kind.
• Yorgos Lanthimos — The Lobster (2015), Poor Things (2023). Heirs to Ionesco and Beckett, building absurd worlds whose rules satirize our own.

The Modern Absurd on TV

One of the more surprising cultural phenomena of the last decade is how much of the existential canon has been smuggled into prestige television.

The Good Place & BoJack

Other recent shows that lean openly existential: True Detective Season 1 (Rust Cohle's Schopenhauer-inflected nihilism, then his Camusian turn at the end); Fleabag (the priest, the silence, the look at the camera); The Leftovers (a sustained meditation on grief, faith, and the search for meaning after an unexplained loss). The vocabulary is contemporary; the questions are the same ones Kierkegaard was asking in 1843.