English Literature

IntroductionAbsurdity is a key phrase in Becketts spectacular writings as well as of the entire Theatre of the Absurd. This section is a short introduction to the philosophical backdrop of Absurdity, in which I deal with three major problems what Absurdity is, in what shape a life instant it seems, and what consequence for a human outlook of life it retains with itself.

What is the value of having such a vision
One of the most rudimentary philosophical inquiries if there is any significance in our reality at all. The human necessity of unifying interpretation of world has habitually been persuaded by belief and creators of the philosophical schemes who made the human life meaningful. The natural yearn to get to understand and realize the world in its most concealed spheres was fulfilled by devout dogmas about the reality of God, which assured the significant possibilities of human life.

Influence on literary figures
In 1883 Friedrich Nietzsche released his magnum opus Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where of the revolutionary thesis that God is dead appeared (Nietzsche, 1992). From that time of Zarathustra the vintage everyday certainties of life begun to lose their certainty. World War I and World War II initiated deep decimation and decrease of human supreme certainties and decisively conveyed about a world missing any unifying standard, a world senseless and disconnected with human life. If one appreciates the non-attendance of sense, and this is the sign of the essence of epoch, in which the Theatre of the Absurd is fixed, the world becomes irrational and the confrontation between the world and the human being who starts to be estranged from it arises here. Martin Esslin mentions Ionescos aligned notion of the absurdity Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose. ...Cut off from his devout, metaphysical, and transcendental origins, man is lost all his activities become senseless, absurd, and useless.

Albert Camus (1913-1960), a French novelist and essayist, who worked out the idea of absurdity and who furthermore directed this thesis in his scholarly writings, agreements with the absurd destiny of man and literally illustrates it with the famous very vintage myth of Sisyphus in his stimulating investigation The Myth of Sisyphus (Essif, 2001). Camus precedes into the difficulty what the absurdity is and how it arises. He furthermore presents the characteristics of human rudimentary ontological classes as the sentiments of denseness and the strangeness of the world, which are the sentiments of the Absurdity of man in a world where the down turn of devout conviction has deprived man of his certainties.

Becketts Individualistic Approach to Absurdity
Absurdity comprises in enduring confrontation, it is a contradiction and a struggle. It can be faced only through laboring with it and contradicting with it. That is why, as Camus states, to consign suicide means to acquiesce with absurdity, it means to give in, because the sense of life is looked for in another world. None of Becketts individual characteristics commit suicide or pass away in any way. It appears that it is unrealistic to get away from the absurd destiny, to stay here means to face it, to commit suicide means to consent to it, and thus it should be accepted (Chabert, 1982). That is the cornerstone of human freedom. Absurdity does not have any sense, does not have any causes, any aspires, and that is why it does not contemplate yesterday, neither tomorrow. The absurd man misses any wants, designs, and problems about his future. He is recommended only as an instant and that is what his flexibility comprises of.  The only way how to paralyze absurdity is to not inquire for reasons.

As a young man, Beckett also experienced this sense of absurdity and meaninglessness in the modern world, but, unlike his modernist predecessors, he could not even muster faith in his art or in language. Thus, while Joyce could revel in the possibilities and textures of the written word, Beckett could not. Instead, he reduced his fictions, his plays, and his poems to the barest elements, and, throughout his career, he tried to rejoin art and life in his own way. For the pre-modernists, art imitated the world beyond the human mind. The modernists rejected this idea of imitation, and so did Beckett. Instead, his art reflects the inner world, the world of the human voice, the only world human beings can ever really experience. In the pre-modern era, art was successful if it depicted some truth about the world. For the modernists, art succeeded only on its own terms, regardless of the world beyond the scope of the arts.

When the Swedish Academy selected Samuel Beckett to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969, the award only confirmed what critics and readers had known for some time that he is one of the most important literary figures of the late twentieth century. Few authors in the history of literature have attracted as much critical attention as Beckett, and with good reason he is both an important figure in his own right and a transitional thinker whose writings mark the end of modernism and the beginning of a new sensibility, postmodernism. The modernists of the early twentieth centuryJames Joyce, W. H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and otherswere stunned by the absurdity of their world. Previous generations had filled that world with philosophical, religious, and political meanings, but their orderly vision of reality no longer seemed to apply to life in the early 1900s (Cronin, 1996).

The modernists lacked the faith of their forebears they had experienced the chaos of the modern world with its potential for global war and the destruction of civilization, and they believed that the order of reality was a fiction, that life was unknowable. In response to their doubts, they turned literature in upon itself, separating it from life, creating an art for its own sake. These writers trusted in language to create new meanings, new knowledge, and a separate, artistic human universe.

Conclusion
For Beckett, art never succeeds. It is a necessary failure which never manages to link the inner mind to outer reality. As such, art is an exercise in courage, foredoomed to failure, like human life itself. Human beings are human beings not because they can give meaning to the world or because they can retreat into aesthetics but because they can recognize that their world is meaningless and that their lives are leading them only toward death yet they must continue to live and strive. As a philosopher of failure, Beckett was the first thinker of the post-modern age.