Abstract

Absurdity, Externality, Nothingness, Freedom, Fragmentation: these five concepts in twentieth-century philosophy combined to revolutionize the way in which we define ourselves in life and literature. They reduce the self to an eye focused on the objective world. This book examines the combined effects of Phenomenology, Existentialism, and the Bergsonian time-construct on the concept of the self and traces the ways in which they have affected fictional characters in the Existential novels of Camus, Sartre, Robbe-Grillet, Barth, Heller and Dennis.