Logic of the Absurds

Logic of the Absurds

Man's fundamental bewilderment and confusion, stems from the fact that man has no answers to the basic existential questions: why we are alive, why we have to die, why there is injustice and suffering, all this serve as the impetus for such a thinking. Man constantly wonders about the truth of life and realizes that the more you expect from it, the more it fails you or may be the more we expect from ourselves the more we find ourselves engaging in a futile battle with the odds. May be the truth is the realization of our limitations and the potency of these odds that press you down with their brutal truths….….brutal?, can the truth be brutal. But the truth is the God, ourselves, the destiny that rules us and fashions us, after a strange decree which we fail to unravel.

"What do I know about man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes."

-Samuel Beckett

Concerning itself with such questions is the genre of literature is the movement called ‘THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD’.

The Theatre of the Absurd (50's) draws on the existentialist writings of Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Camus adapted Dostoyevsky's The Possesed to the stage (1959).

Mostly, his writing was concerned with the dilemma of individuals who believe that values are relative but who cannot live without moral commitment. Camus argues that humanity has to resign itself to recognizing that a fully satisfying rational explanation of the universe is beyond its reach; thus the world must ultimately be seen as absurd. The underpinnings of the Theatre of the Absurd are derived from these existentialist ideas that led to Absurdism. Absurdism teaches, much like Camus, that, that which cannot be justified in a rational manner is absurd. Since religion requires a "leap of faith"(Kierkegaard) it is absurd, just as life itself is absurd.

The Theater of the Absurd refers to tendencies in dramatic literature that emerged in Paris during the late 1940s and early '50s in the plays of Arthur Adamov, Fernando Arrabal, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, and Jean Tardieu.

A term coined by the critic Martin Esslin, 'The Theatre of the Absurd' refers to the work of a number of playwrights, mostly written in the 1950s and 1960s. Its roots lie in an essay by the French philosopher Albert Camus. In his 'Myth of Sisyphus', written in 1942, he first defined the human situation as basically meaningless and absurd.