Beyond Absurdity

Have you ever experienced the feeling of absurdity, when the whole life seems meaningless, joyless, hopeless, boring and tiresome, though -like Sisyphus-one cannot but believe in the joy of living? Albert Camus, the French philosopher, taught us about it; Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and William Eastlake manifested it in their war novels Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-five, and The Bamboo Bed respectively. A human being experiencing this feeling can either choose to surrender and die, as in The Bamboo Bed, or rebel, as in the other novels. Rebellion can be of various forms; some go to strikes and demonstrations; others, like Yossarian in Catch-22, may rebel through claiming madness; still others, like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-five may rebel through escaping to a world of their own imagination. This study aims at unfolding the secrets hidden in the theory, as well as in the novels, in an attempt to explain the human experience in reality and in fiction, and to find answers to the persisting "why".