Date of Award
Spring 5-15-2015
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts (BA)
Department
English
College
College of Humanities and Fine Arts
First Advisor
Steven L. Hamelman
Abstract/Description
Existentialism is a field of philosophy concerned with questions about existence, death, God, and consciousness. It is "a doctrine that concentrates on the existence of the individual, who, being free and responsible, is held to be what he makes himself by the self-development of his essence through acts of the will" (OED Online). Writing by existentialist philosophers "often belongs more to literature than to philosophy" (Bigelow 173). Existentialist characters in literature are autonomous agents who tend to lack religious faith, constantly ask existentialist questions, and struggle with their own existence and relationship to the world around them. Additionally, existentialist characters struggle with the reality of their own mortality. These struggles are apparent in novels with existentialist protagonists. In the novels of Sartre, Camus, and DeLillo, autodiegetic main characters serve as the heroes of their own existentialist crises in order to realistically chronicle the plight of the existentialist.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Mullis, Courtney, "Unlikely Heroes in Despair: Existentialist Narrators in the Novels of Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, and Don DeLillo" (2015). Honors Theses. 13.
https://digitalcommons.coastal.edu/honors-theses/13