What is Absurdism?

Defining absurdist philosophy

Absurdism is founded on the belief that we live in a chaotic, purposeless universe and human existence has no inherent meaning. Despite this, humans still try to find or create meaning. This paradox produces the absurd.

Colloquially, “absurd” means ridiculous, nonsensical, and illogical. While there is plenty of ridiculousness in plays, novels, and films engaging with the absurd, absurdism also probes fundamental philosophical questions about how to live our lives. Faced with no clear answers or purpose, absurdists do not freeze up; they push onward.

Albert Camus is considered the founder of absurdism. Camus sees absurdity arising from our paradoxical desire to find a unified explanation for the universe when constantly faced with the inaccessibility of that explanation. Camus proposes that we live with this tension, without resorting to despair or false systems of meaning. Criticizing Jean-Paul Sartre and other existentialists for “thinking that life is tragic because it is wretched,” Camus argues,

Camus’s emphasis on continued living and joy in the face of absurdity distinguishes absurdism from nihilism. Nihilism also views the universe as inherently meaningless but rejects all morality and ethics, and perhaps even life itself. For Camus, one must live in the face of the absurd, and can even live ethically and happily.

The emergence of absurdist philosophy in the 1940s and the Theatre of the Absurd in the 1950s is no historical coincidence. As thinkers struggled to make sense of the atrocities of two world wars and the Holocaust, the looming threat of nuclear annihilation, and the expanding view of the universe through space exploration, absurdism’s response — that everything does not make sense — seemed like a reasonable one. Literature of the Absurd and Theatre of the Absurd explore this incomprehensible world and question how we might make meaning — or at least laugh — when faced with absurdity.

Origins of the absurd: avant-garde art and Kafka

While absurdism was proposed by Camus in the 1940s, it was influenced by other philosophical and artistic movements including avant-garde art and the writings of Franz Kafka. 

Avant-garde art: Ubu Roi, Dadaism, and surrealism

The aesthetics and approach of avant-garde art influenced absurdism. Avant-garde art challenges the conception and measurement of beauty and values. By questioning what is given meaning and importance in the art world, we might unsettle what is given meaning and importance in life itself.

Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi is an important origin point for the Theatre of the Absurd and absurdism generally as later articulated by Camus, although it only played for a single performance in Paris in 1896 and a second in 1898. Parodying Shakespeare, Greek tragedy, physics, and dramatic conventions, Ubu Roi presented a dark and prophetic satire of an incomprehensible, carnage-filled world. Leonard Pronko writes,

While Jarry’s play certainly looks toward the Theatre of the Absurd of the 1950s, “the anarchy in Ubu Roi is man-made and, presumably, can be corrected by man” (The Absurd, Hinchliffe, 1969, [2017]). It “suggests very little of an ontological nature” or the meaningless universe explored by later absurdist plays (Pronko, 1962, [2023]).

Ubu Roi’s challenge to artistic conventions foreshadowed two movements that developed in the early twentieth century and also influenced absurdism: Dadaism and surrealism. Both rejected artistic expectations and accepted aesthetics and depicted a chaotic, illogical world. 

The nonsensical word “dada” captures the spirit of the movement named after it: influenced by nihilism and Friedrich Nietzche’s philosophies, Dadaists sought to reveal the meaningless nature of the world through art. Famous Dadaist Marcel Duchamp created “readymades” by signing mass-produced or everyday objects and presenting them in galleries; for example, Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) is a porcelain urinal displayed on its back, dated and signed with the pseudonym “R. Mutt.” By using ordinary objects that he came across accidentally and did not create himself, Duchamp upset artistic hierarchies and the foundations of the art industry. Illustrating how meaning is not inherent but assigned by humans arbitrarily, Duchamp prefigures absurdist tendencies and aesthetics.

Emerging after World War I, surrealism built on Dada’s “attack on the rhetoric of reason” and maintained an interest in “the centrality of chance, the questioning of received attitudes toward morality,” and the depiction of an illogical world (Hopkins, A Companion to Dada and Surrealism, 2022). Exemplified by the strange paintings of Salvador Dalí, surrealist art, literature, and film renders familiar objects strange and eschews structure and order. Surrealism is distinguished from absurdism in its embrace of a dreamlike state: while surrealism blurs reality and dreams, conscious and unconscious states, absurdism tends to depict reality itself as nonsensical and ridiculous.

The literature of Franz Kafka

Camus first applied absurdism to literature by discussing Franz Kafka’s work. Kafka’s fiction employs grotesque, ridiculous, or parabolic situations to reveal the absurdity of industrialization, capitalism, and bureaucracy. As Jürgen Pelzer writes in his introduction to The Metamorphosis and Other Stories (2017), 

For example, “The Metamorphosis” (1915) opens with Gregor Samsa waking to discover he is now a monstrous bug. Despite his transformation, Gregor is mostly concerned about his job, wondering if he can catch the next train or if he should call in sick:

Gregor’s concerns reveal his preoccupation with work: “He was the boss’s creature, spineless and stupid” (Kafka, 2017). Many critics interpret Samsa’s transformation as an illustration of the alienation of workers under capitalism and the dehumanizing effects of modern work conditions. An absurdist reading would argue that we are all like Gregor, bugs worried about getting to work on time. We cling to routines, careers, and goals; we believe in making money, working hard, achieving financial stability. All the while, we ignore the truth of our situation, that our existences have no inherent meaning.

Absurdism vs. existentialism: connections and conflict

Historians and critics often connect absurdism with existentialism, another twentieth-century philosophical movement. Although Camus intended absurdism as a critique of existentialism, the two philosophies  both ask how to face a meaningless world without giving into nihilism, and they share similar developmental trajectories. 

The origins of absurdism and existentialism can be found in the nineteenth-century philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s existentialism co-existed with his Christian beliefs. For him, faith in God is absurd; the divine is incomprehensible through rational thought. Kierkegaard advocates for a “leap of faith,” a necessary abandonment of logic and rationality to accept God’s existence without proof. Kierkegaard locates the absurd in the paradox of the omnipotent God made human through Jesus. Kierkegaard writes, 

Kierkegaard’s belief in an unknowable God, and distrust in human systems that claimed to speak for God, laid the foundations for existentialism. Atheistic existentialists, like Sartre, argue that there are no inherent moral systems, so we must choose what ethical living looks like for ourselves. Whether absurdity rises from the unknowability of God or the purposelessness of life, existentialists respond to this lack of clear meaning with action. As Jack Reynolds explains,

This decision to create meaning in a meaningless world is what distinguishes existentialism from nihilism. Sartre and other existentialists sought to create meaning by asking how existentialism fit into a larger trajectory of history and attempting to reconcile existentialism with Marxism.

Camus criticizes both theistic and atheistic existentialism. Camus saw Kierkegaard’s leap of faith as “philosophical suicide,” an abandonment of intellectual rigor and retreat into religion to avoid facing absurdity (The Myth of Sisyphus, 2018). Atheistic existentialists also undermined their philosophy by trading belief in God for belief in history and attempting to fit existentialism into what Camus saw as false systems of meaning. As Foley writes,

Camus writes that all philosophies of existentialism “suggest escape” from the absurd and retreat into false ideologies, whether secular or religious:

To Camus, existentialists had seen the absurdity of life but turned away. Camus argued that recognition of the absurd “cannot be an end in itself but only a beginning” of a philosophy, which we explore more in the next section. 

Despite Camus’s critiques of existentialism, he is often associated with  existentialism, and the connections between the philosophies are important to consider. See our guide “What is Existentialism?” for more.

Key absurdist texts: Camus’s Sisyphus and L’Étranger

Now that we’ve examined the relationship between absurdism and existentialism, let’s take a closer look at the works in which Camus articulates  absurdism: his essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) and his novel L'Étranger (1942)..

Camus begins The Myth of Sisyphus with what he sees as the core question of philosophy: whether or not to kill oneself when faced with an absurd world. Camus argues that we must accept and live with absurdity: “we should keep the absurd alive rather than attempt to suppress it through philosophical suicide, or destroy it through physical suicide” (Foley, 2014). Camus writes,

Living with the absurd is core to Camus’s ideas of ethical living and revolt. 

Camus illustrates his ideas with the story of Sisyphus. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus received special punishment from the gods. He must spend his afterlife pushing a boulder up a hill; each time he reaches the summit, the rock rolls back down, and Sisyphus begins his task again. Camus argues that Sisyphus must be conscious of his tasks’s futility, but we need not imagine him suffering. Instead, we “must imagine Sisyphus happy”: “Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable” (Camus, 2018). Camus imagines Sisyphus returning to the hill’s base to start again:

By picturing Sisyphus happy, Camus imagines how we might find joy without ignoring the meaninglessness of our existences.

While the The Myth of Sisyphus “attempts to resolve the problem of suicide,” Camus explains, L’Étranger “attempts to resolve that of murder, in both cases without the aid of eternal values which, temporarily perhaps, are absent or distorted in contemporary Europe” (2018). 

L’Étranger tells the story of Meursault, a French man living in Algeria, who kills an Arab man seemingly at random. In the face of his mother’s death, a potential romance, and even his own murder trial, Mersault feels everything is meaningless. He eventually finds relief, even happiness, in “the gentle indifference of the world” (Camus, 1993). Camus captures Meursault’s disconnection from the world around him as he realizes life is inexplicable and arbitrary. 

In both The Myth of Sisyphus and L’Étranger, Camus proposes the possibilities of living joyfully while facing the absurd. In the next two sections, we will look at creative responses to encounters with the absurd, or the absurd onstage and in literature.

The Theatre of the Absurd (1950s–1970s)

In the 1950s, absurdism moved onstage — perhaps most famously with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The 1953 play featured two vagrants, Estragon and Vladimir, who are waiting for the mysterious Godot. Critics have used Estragon’s own words to summarize the play: “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!” (Beckett, 2011). In actuality, as Mark Taylor-Betty and Juliette Taylor-Betty point out, “things happen, but nothing changes”(Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, 2013). Godot features conversations without meaning, events without plot, the trappings of theatre without a motivating story. The characters speak in circles, without clear desires, making it difficult for the audience to become invested in them — and any investment is not rewarded. 

Michael Bennet finds it unsurprising that Godot “confounded audiences, arguably, unlike any play that has come before or after it,” but it was not the only culprit:

Martin Esslin described this new theatre as “The Theatre of the Absurd” in a 1960 journal article, later expanded into a 1961 book. The Theatre of the Absurd describes plays performed largely between 1950 and 1970 that share at least some of the following features: illogical plots, wordplay and nonsensical language, circular structures, repetition, farcical comedy, trivial themes, seemingly random developments, and characters in whom it is difficult to become invested. These plays challenged theatrical conventions and confronted their audiences with incomprehensibility and ridiculousness — to comedic or tragic effect, often a mix of both. 

Esslin writes, “instead of being in suspense as to what will happen next, the spectators are, in the Theatre of the Absurd, put into suspense as to what the play may mean” (1960). With no answer provided during the play, this “suspense continues even after the curtain has come down,” making the Theatre of the Absurd, for Esslin, “the most demanding, the most intellectual theatre” (1960). Though often hilarious, overexaggerated, and even vulgar, the Theatre of the Absurd provokes its spectator “with a genuine intellectual problem, a philosophical paradox, which he will have to try to solve even if he knows that it is most probably insoluble” (Esslin, 1960).

Many famous twentieth-century playwrights engaged with the Theatre of the Absurd. Alongside Beckett, Ionesco stands as another giant, writing plays like The Bald Soprano (1950) — featuring characters who speak only in cliched and hackneyed language — and Rhinoceros (1959) — in which a town’s residents steadily turn into rhinoceroses, often interpreted as a metaphor for fascism and Nazism. Other major playwrights in the Theater of the Absurd are Arthur Adamov, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter, and other associated writers include Robert Pinget, N. F. Simpson, Edward Albee, Fernando Arrabal, and Gunter Grass. The Theatre of the Absurd has been largely considered a male-dominated tradition, but there are important female playwrights who engaged with absurdist ideas, such as María Irene Fornés, Caryl Churchill, Margaret Hollingsworth, and Liudmila Petrushevskaia. 

Beyond describing the Theatre of the Absurd, Esslin argued for a purpose behind these plays. While they may be bewildering, Esslin argues that they are not complete nonsense:

The Theatre of the Absurd responds to an increasingly incomprehensible world. The mid-twentieth century saw a decline in religious faith, distrust in historical progress (in part due to the century’s atrocities and rise in totalitarianism), the threat of weapons of mass destruction, and a perceived erosion of unifying value systems. Parroting Camus, Esslin argues that even ideologies like Marxism or psychoanalysis are to the Theatre of the Absurd “superficial rationalizations which try to hide the depth of man’s predicament, his loneliness and anxiety” (1960). Esslin writes,

Beyond the stage: the literary absurd and absurdist fiction

Absurdism in literature has not led to as well-defined a category of “Literature of the Absurd” as the Theatre of the Absurd, but there is certainly a strong tradition of literary absurdity and absurdist fiction. Unlike the Theatre of the Absurd, which was concentrated in the 1950s through the 1970s, the literary absurd appears in an eclectic mix of works and stretches across time periods: its origins lie in the novels of François Rabelais and Jonathan Swift, and nineteenth-century writers like Lewis Carroll, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Joseph Conrad have been interpreted through this lens. 

In Reading the Absurd (2013), Joanna Gavis provides a rigorous account of the literary absurd, attempting to wrangle a definition, identification method, and reading approach for this nebulous and diverse concept. Kafka, Camus, and Beckett (who also wrote prose and poetry) are all important figures in this tradition. Gavis lists the following writers in addition to those already mentioned: John Barth, Joseph Heller, Daniil Kharms, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, John Kennedy Toole, Flann O’Brien, and Mikhail Bulgakov. 

Non-dramatic literature has played an important role in absurdism’s development; Camus himself wrote on Kafka’s fiction and penned a novel to introduce his ideas. But Esslin argues that theatre is the best medium for exploring “the bewildering complexity of the human condition,” because language alone is “far too straightforward an instrument”: 

While describing the theatre’s aptness for exploring the absurd, Esslin highlights the absurd’s power:

Closing thoughts

While absurdism named as such seems less popular today than it was in the twentieth century, absurdist ideas can still be found in our culture, from memes to movies.

Just one example is Everything Everywhere All at Once (Kwan and Scheinert, 2022), the most-awarded movie of all time according to IGN. The film follows Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), a middle-aged Chinese immigrant, as she attempts to keep her business afloat and navigate tense relationships with her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), and daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu). While a moving story about an everyday family, the film is also an action-packed romp through the metaverse and an explosive exploration of existentialism, nihilism, and absurdism. The movie’s meaningless, multiplicitous universe unfolds in a variety of absurd situations, such as a conversation between two rocks, a love story between two women with hotdogs for fingers, and a literal everything bagel that has been topped with everything in the universe.

Our world is no less comprehensible today than it was when Camus introduced his philosophy of absurdism. Plays, novels, and films exploring absurdist ideas can help us not only to laugh at the weirdness of our world but also to live up to Camus’s instructions: keep the absurd alive and face our Sisyphean fates while smiling.

Further reading on Perlego

Catch-22 (1961, [2010]) by Joseph Heller 

Ionesco: A Study of His Plays (1971, [2023]) by Richard Coe

Rethinking the Politics of Absurdity: Albert Camus, Postmodernity, and the Survival of Innocence (2013) by Matthew H. Bowker

The absurd in literature (2013) by Neil Cornwell

Affirming the Absurd in Harold Pinter (2013) by Jane Wong Yeang Chui

American Social Issues in Four Absurdist Plays by Edward Albee (2017) by Firas Al-Khateeb

The Psychoanalysis of the Absurd: Existentialism and Phenomenology in Contemporary Psychoanalysis (2020) by Mark Leffert

Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Ordinary (2023) by Raymond D. Boisvert

Bibliography 

Beckett, S. (2011) Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts. Grove Atlantic.

Bennett, M. Y. (2011) Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd: Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and Pinter. Palgrave Macmillan. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3480036/reassessing-the-theatre-of-the-absurd-camus-beckett-ionesco-genet-and-pinter-pdf 

Camus, A. (1993) The Stranger. Translated by M. Ward. Vintage.

Camus, A. (2018) The Myth of Sisyphus. Translated by J. O’Brien. Vintage. 

Esslin, M. (1960) “The Theatre of the Absurd,” The Tulane Drama Review, 4(4), pp. 3–15. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1124873 

Esslin, M. (2004) The Theatre of the Absurd. 3rd edn. Vintage.

Foley, J. (2014) Albert Camus: From the Absurd to Revolt. Routledge. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1561347/albert-camus-from-the-absurd-to-revolt-pdf 

Gavins, J. (2013) Reading the Absurd. Edinburgh University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1708928/reading-the-absurd-pdf 

Hinchliffe, A. P. (2017) The Absurd. Routledge. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1488944/the-absurd-pdf 

Hopkins, D. (ed.) (2016) A Companion to Dada and Surrealism. Wiley. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/990835/a-companion-to-dada-and-surrealism-pdf 

Howarth, S. (2000) Marcel Duchamp: Fountain. Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-fountain-t07573 

Ionesco, E. (2015) The Bald Soprano and Other Plays. Grove Atlantic. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2448157/the-bald-soprano-other-plays-pdf 

Ionesco, E. (2015) Rhinoceros and Other Plays. Grove Atlantic. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2448174/rhinoceros-and-other-plays-pdf 

Jarry, A. (1997) Ubu. Translated by K. McLeish. Broadway Play Publishing.

Kafka, F. (2017) The Metamorphosis and Other Stories. Translated by K. Pelzer. Barnes & Noble. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3717318/the-metamorphosis-and-other-stories-barnes-noble-collectible-editions-pdf 

Kierkegaard, S. (2013) The Essential Kierkegaard. Princeton University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/735770/the-essential-kierkegaard-pdf 

Pronko, L. (2023) Avant-Garde: The Experimental Theater in France. University of California Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3905142/avantgarde-the-experimental-theater-in-france-pdf 

Pelzer, J. (2017) “Introduction,” in Kafka, F. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories. Barnes & Noble. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/3717318/the-metamorphosis-and-other-stories-barnes-noble-collectible-editions-pdf

Reynolds, J. (2014) Understanding Existentialism. Routledge. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1560169/understanding-existentialism-pdf

Taylor-Batty, M. and Taylor-Batty, J. (2013) Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Continuum. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/806161/samuel-becketts-waiting-for-godot-pdf 

Zee, M. (2023) “Everything Everywhere All at Once Passes Return of the King as Most-Awarded Movie Ever,” IGN, 9 March. Available at: https://www.ign.com/articles/everything-everywhere-all-at-once-return-of-the-king-most-awarded-movie 

Filmography

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) Directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. Available on Showtime.