Week 2: The Absurd

 

“Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”

― Albert Camus

 

The absurd as a way to challenge meaning, logic, and language in literature.

Albert Camus begins The Myth of Sisyphus with a radical claim: that the only truly serious philosophical question is suicide. If life has no ultimate meaning, no final answer, why continue living?

But Camus refuses despair. He argues instead that once we accept the absence of inherent meaning, we are free: free to invent, to create, to play. The absurd doesn’t demand resignation; it demands imagination. He describes Sisyphus, condemned to push his boulder up the hill forever, not as a tragic figure, but as a happy one because he transforms his endless struggle into his own form of freedom.

And that’s where writing comes in. Literature allows us to confront that silence, that lack of certainty and then turn it into art. In this session, we’ll experiment with how absurdity can break logic, disrupt language, and open surprising new doors for creativity

 

Conceptual Frame

 

General Introduction

When we speak of the absurd, we’re pointing to a very old tension: the gap between our hunger for order and meaning, and the world’s tendency to resist those demands. Human beings want explanations, patterns, and logic. But reality often gives us contradiction, confusion, and silence.

Literature has always found power here. Writers turn to the absurd not only to describe the strangeness of existence, but to create with it. By bending or breaking logic, they reveal something deeper about what it means to be alive. The absurd becomes a creative tool: a way to unsettle, to disorient, and, in that disorientation, to open new possibilities.

In the rest of this session, we’ll see how different writers (Camus, Kafka, Beckett) approached the absurd in their work, and how we can draw from them in our own writing.

 

ALBERT CAMUS

Let’s start with Albert Camus. Let me first share one of my favorite quotes from The Myth of Sisyphus:

“To work and create ‘for nothing’, to sculpture in clay, to know that one’s creation has no future, to see one’s work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries- this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on one hand and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors.”

In The Myth of Sisyphus, he tells us that life has no inherent meaning. We search for clarity, for reasons, for purpose but the universe does not answer. It is silent. And that silence creates tension, a clash between our human need for sense and the world’s indifference. That clash is what Camus calls the absurd.

Camus says: if the world gives us no final answers, then we must invent. We must create. He writes that the absurd does not free us from responsibility, but from illusion; and in that freedom, we can build, we can love, we can make art.

This is where writing comes in. To write in the face of the absurd is itself an act of defiance, a way of saying: I know there is no ultimate guarantee of meaning, but I choose to create it anyway. In his later work The Rebel, Camus takes this even further: he argues that rebellion, whether political, artistic, or personal, is what gives dignity to human life.

So, for us as writers, Camus is not telling us to stop searching. He’s telling us to embrace the fact that there is no single, permanent answer and that this opens the door to infinite creation. Writing becomes not just expression, but a form of resistance and freedom.

 

 

FRANZ KAFKA

Franz Kafka gives us some of the clearest images of the absurd in literature. His characters find themselves trapped in situations that defy explanation, situations that are both impossible and yet described in the most matter-of-fact tone.

 

Take The Trial: Josef K. is arrested and prosecuted, but he is never told what crime he has committed. He is forced through endless bureaucratic corridors, facing authorities who never explain themselves. The world of the novel is recognizably our own: offices, officials, documents, and yet everything is distorted, opaque, impenetrable. The absurd here is not loud or chaotic, but quietly suffocating.

 

Or The Metamorphosis, which begins with one of the most famous lines in modern literature:

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

 

No reason is given for this transformation. No scientific explanation, no dream sequence to excuse it. It just is. The world has shifted to the impossible without warning, and the characters must continue as if it were strangely normal.

 

What’s striking is how Kafka refuses resolution. He does not explain why Gregor became an insect, nor why Josef K. is condemned. The absurd comes from this refusal. The world denies us answers, and in that denial, it mirrors the deeper uncertainties of life.

 

For us as writers, Kafka’s lesson is liberating: a story does not need to justify itself through explanation. Meaning can arise from the inexplicable, the unanswerable, the situation that resists logic. Sometimes, the most powerful writing begins not with what we can explain, but with what we cannot.

 

SAMUEL BECKETT

 

Samuel Beckett takes the absurd into the very structure of his plays and novels. Where Kafka placed characters in inexplicable situations, Beckett places them in endless waiting. In Waiting for Godot, two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, stand by a tree and wait for someone who never arrives. Day after day, scene after scene, they repeat themselves, circling through the same gestures, the same fragments of dialogue.

 

What makes the play so unsettling, and at times comic, is that nothing really happens. The anticipation builds and collapses, only to start again. Logic is suspended. Time itself seems to dissolve into repetition. And yet the characters persist. They cannot leave, they cannot conclude, they cannot find resolution.

 

This endless repetition is not only about despair: it also reveals the persistence of life in the face of emptiness. Even when nothing happens, they go on speaking. Even when silence surrounds them, they go on waiting.

 

Beckett’s work often returns to this paradox: the impossibility of continuing, and yet the impossibility of stopping. It’s captured in the final line of The Unnamable: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

 

That impossible loop is the essence of the absurd in Beckett. To feel his style more closely, let’s turn briefly to Molloy, where his sentences spiral and collapse, where thought tries to grasp itself and slips away again. I’ll read a short passage so we can hear the rhythm of Beckett’s absurdity in motion.

 

{Reading of Molloy – Refer to video at bottom of this lesson}

Exercise 1: The Impossible Situation

 

Now that we’ve seen how writers like Camus, Kafka, and Beckett embraced the absurd, let’s try it ourselves. I invite you to write short pieces that break logic and resist explanation, not to create nonsense, but to discover what unexpected truths might appear when common sense collapses.

For the first exercise, write a short scene or fragment where the world follows a rule that makes no sense, but everyone must live with it. Don’t explain it, just let it be part of reality. Start with a sentence that already breaks logic.

Possible starting lines:

• Time does not exist, yet things still happen:
  Breakfast never began, yet the dishes are already dirty, and the day insists on moving forward without hours to carry it.

• There are no fixed boundaries between things:
  My coffee cup seeps into my hand, my hand into the table.

• Shadows no longer follow bodies and they wander off on their own:
  Mine left me at the station yesterday; I saw it trailing after another passenger, more loyal to them than to me.

• Everyone wakes up with a new face each morning, but no one comments on it:
  Today my daughter wore the face of a stranger, and I kissed her forehead as if it were the most natural thing in the world, but it smelled of vinegar and tobacco.

Remember: Don’t try to explain the rule. Just show us what it feels like to live inside it.

 

 

Exercise 2: The Dialogue of Nonsense

Now let’s try a short dialogue between two characters who cannot understand each other. They might be speaking the same language, but the logic of what they say never connects. Yet they continue the conversation as if it makes perfect sense to them.

Here’s an example:

 

• A: ‘The floor is melting again.’
  B: ‘Then why are you still holding the umbrella?’

• A: ‘Have you fed the silence today?’
  B: ‘Only with half a sentence. It was enough.’

• A: ‘I’ve misplaced my shadow.’
  B: ‘Check the fridge, that’s where I keep mine.’

 

Don’t worry about coherence. Let the conversation keep going, even if the replies ignore each other. Sometimes absurdity lives in persistence, not resolution.

Final Words

Thank you for joining this workshop. I hope that my lack of knowledge, my shaky rationality, and my derailing train of thought have somehow inspired you to discover new ways of making silence shine brighter.

 

This week, keep an eye on the illogical moments in your own day, the fragments that don’t quite fit, and consider how they might become material for your writing. Next time, we’ll turn toward silence itself: not the collapse of sense, but the quiet that holds meaning in its absence.