His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land.
But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. “A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. At least not till something else created another diversion.Ĭamus wrote his famous treatise on suicide, The Myth of Sisyphus around the same time, in which he defined the absurd as, The revelation had been arrived at and there was no going back. Resuming the struggle so easily was not an option anymore. An uncertainty that before could easily be dismissed with a flick of the head, “be reasonable, you haven’t yet tried everything”.
Marooned on the island of uncertainty, the human subject tried to grapple with its fate. Little faith prevailed in institutions long assumed to be all-powerful: religion, government, science, even society. Millions of lives had been lost, the economy was at an all-time low, food was scarce, everyone had lost someone, and those who survived couldn’t find the will to go on. Writing in the wake of the second world war, Samuel Beckett, like many of his contemporaries, was voicing a collective experience, as the world tried to make sense of the absurdity of human existence.
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