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What "existentialism" means in literature

A term you'll meet in 20th-century literature & philosophy.

Existentialism is the twentieth-century literary and philosophical movement that took human freedom, anxiety, and the absence of given meaning as its central subjects. The label covers a loose group of thinkers and writers — Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky as nineteenth-century precursors, Heidegger and Jaspers as philosophical mid-twentieth- century figures, Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir, and Marcel as its French postwar centre. The literature of existentialism is the artistic working-out of philosophical positions, and the positions can't be fully extracted from the literature.

The basic claims

The existentialist tradition agrees on a small set of foundational positions:

• "Existence precedes essence." Sartre's famous formulation. Humans are not born with a fixed nature that determines what they should do; we are first, and only then do we have to make ourselves into something.
• Radical freedom. Because we have no pre-given nature, we are radically responsible for our choices. The freedom is not exhilarating but vertiginous — Kierkegaard called it the "dizziness of freedom."
• The absurd. Camus's variation. Human consciousness demands meaning; the universe does not supply it. The mismatch between the demand and the silence is "the absurd."
• Anxiety (angst). The mood of recognising one's freedom and one's mortality is anxiety. Not depression, not fear of a specific thing — a more general unease about one's own existence.
• Authenticity. The good life, in existentialist terms, is the life lived in honest acknowledgment of one's freedom and finitude — as opposed to "bad faith," the constant evasions by which we deny these conditions.

The literary precursors

Two nineteenth-century writers are usually treated as existentialism's literary ancestors:

• Dostoevsky. Notes from Underground (1864) is sometimes called the first existentialist novel — a narrator's first-person account of his own spiteful, self-aware, freely-chosen miserableness. Crime and Punishment dramatizes the working-out of a theory of action against the resistance of conscience. The Brothers Karamazov contains the "Grand Inquisitor" sequence, one of the most important pieces of religious existentialist thinking.
• Kierkegaard. The Danish theologian's books — particularly Fear and Trembling (1843) and The Concept of Anxiety (1844) — are philosophical works that read as literature: dramatized, pseudonymous, deeply embedded in specific scriptural narratives. He is often considered the first existentialist proper.

The postwar French centre

What we now call "existentialism" in the narrow sense is mainly a postwar French movement organised around Jean-Paul Sartre and the journal Les Temps Modernes. Major figures:

• Jean-Paul Sartre. Philosophical magnum opus Being and Nothingness (1943); also the novel Nausea (1938) and plays including No Exit (1944). Coined "existence precedes essence" in his 1945 lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism.
• Albert Camus. Wrote The Stranger (1942) and the philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) on the absurd, then The Plague (1947) and The Rebel (1951). Camus eventually rejected the existentialist label and broke with Sartre. See our entry on the absurd in Camus.
• Simone de Beauvoir. The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) was the most systematic existentialist ethics; The Second Sex (1949) applied existentialist analysis to the situation of women, becoming the foundational text of postwar feminism.

The existentialist novel

The literary works that came out of this tradition share recognizable features:

• The detached, observing narrator. Camus's Meursault, Sartre's Roquentin, Beauvoir's protagonists — narrators who watch their own lives with a slightly alienated awareness.
• The crisis as the novel's centre. A moment when the protagonist's habitual structure of meaning collapses, leaving them to confront freedom and finitude directly. Roquentin in the park; Meursault at the trial.
• The everyday made strange. The existentialist novel often uses defamiliarization to make ordinary objects (a tree root, a beach, a restaurant menu) feel suddenly arbitrary or oppressive.
• The refused consolation. The existentialist novel typically declines the available consolations — religious, romantic, political. The closing position is often one the reader has to inhabit without reconciliation.

Existentialism vs. absurdism

Camus's "absurd" is sometimes treated as a sub-position within existentialism, sometimes as a competing one. The distinction: Sartre's existentialism emphasizes freedom and the responsibility to make oneself; Camus's absurdism emphasizes the mismatch between human demand for meaning and the universe's silence, and the question of how to live within that mismatch. Both reject pre-given essences; they differ on what to do next.

Existentialism beyond philosophy

The movement's influence extended beyond philosophy. It shaped:

• Mid-century theatre. Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1953), Ionesco's Rhinoceros, the Theatre of the Absurd.
• Postwar American fiction. Salinger, Bellow, Updike, Carver — each in different ways inherits the existentialist concern with consciousness, freedom, and finitude.
• Cinema. Bergman, Antonioni, the early New Wave — visual existentialism. Tarkovsky and Kieślowski continued the tradition into Eastern European cinema.
• Popular psychology and self-help. The vocabulary of "authenticity," "meaning-making," "creating your own purpose" — common now in mainstream advice writing — descends from existentialism in attenuated form.

How to read it in context

When a novel's protagonist is a detached observer of their own life, when the surface action is ordinary but the narration registers ordinary things as strange or arbitrary, when consolations are offered and refused, when the closing position is acceptance of difficulty rather than resolution — you are reading existentialist literature. The form is more specific than "literature that deals with meaning"; it has a particular philosophical vocabulary and a particular set of moves.

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