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Unit 3: Literary Terms: Comedy of Manners, Absurd Theatre, and Existentialism

make a choice—to flip a coin, as it were, and to leave everything to chance. This is considered Notes
to be a refusal to live in the consequence of one’s freedom; an inauthentic existence.
(2) Angst: Also called as fear or dread, anxiety or even anguish is a term that is common to many
existentialism thinkers. It is not directed at any specific object, it’s just there. Anguish is the
dread of the nothingness of human existence, the meaningless of it. According to Kierkegaard,
anguish is the underlying, all-pervasive, universal condition of man’s existence. It is generally
held to be a negative feeling arising from the experience of human freedom and responsibility.
The archetypal example is the experience one has when standing on a cliff where one not only
fears falling off it, but also dreads the possibility of throwing oneself off. In this experience
that “nothing is holding me back”, one senses the lack of anything that predetermines one to
either throw oneself off or to stand still, and one experiences one’s own freedom.

One of the most extensive treatments of the existentialist notion of Angst is found
in Soren Kierkegaard’s monumental work Begrebet Angest.
(3) Absurdity: “Granted I am my own existence, but this existence is absurd.” Everybody is here,
everybody exists, but there is no reason as to why. We’re just here, that’s it, no excuses. The
notion of the absurd contains the idea that there is no meaning to be found in the world
beyond what meaning we give to it. This meaninglessness also encompasses the amorality or
“unfairness” of the world. This contrasts with “karmic” ways of thinking in which “bad things
don’t happen to good people”; to the world, metaphorically speaking, there is no such thing
as a good person or a bad thing; what happens, and it may just as well happen to a “good”
person as to a “bad” person.
Because of the world’s absurdity, at any point in time, anything can happen to anyone, and a
tragic event could plummet someone into direct confrontation with the Absurd. The notion of
the absurd has been prominent in literature throughout history.

Soren Kierkegaard, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and many of the literary
works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus contain descriptions of people who
encounter the absurdity of the world. Albert Camus studied the issue of “the absurd”
in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus.
(4) Nothingness: There is nothing that structures this world’s existence, man’s existence, or the
existence of my computer. There is no essence that these things are drawn from, since existence
precedes essence, then that means there is nothing.
(5) Death: The theme of death follows along with the theme of nothingness. Death is always
there, there is no escaping from it. To think of death, as everybody does sooner or later,
causes anxiety. The only sure way to end anxiety once and for all is death.
(6) Facticity: A concept defined by Sartre in Being and Nothingness as that “in-itself” of which
humans are in the mode of not being. This can be more easily understood when considering
it in relation to the temporal dimension of past: One’s past is what one is in the sense that it
co-constitutes oneself. However, to say that one is only one’s past would be to ignore a large
part of reality (the present and the future), while saying that one’s past is only what one was
would entirely detach it from them now. A denial of one’s own concrete past constitutes an
inauthentic lifestyle, and the same goes for all other kinds of facticity (having a body (e.g. one
that doesn’t allow a person to run faster than the speed of sound), identity, values, etc.).

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