Definition
Ridiculous or unreasonable, a definition that has been extended to characterize human life. In the 20th-century philosophy of existentialism, the French writer Albert Camus employed the term to describe the futility of human existence, which he compared to the story of Sisyphus, the figure in Greek mythology condemned for eternity to push a stone to the top of a mountain only to have it roll back down again.
In the wake of two world wars, the principle of absurdity found fertile soil in the imaginations of modern writers. An early example is the fiction of Franz Kafka, peopled with guilt-ridden, alienated, grotesquely comic characters. In the 1950s a group of playwrights created a new form of drama, which the critic Martin Esslin named "the theatre of the absurd," to describe plays that abandoned traditional construction and conventional dialogue. These plays were notable for their illogical structure and the irrational behavior of their characters. Chief among the absurdist playwrights was Samuel Beckett, whose Waiting for Godot (1953) and Endgame (1957) had a revolutionary impact on modern drama. In Waiting for Godot, two tramps wait for Godot, who sends a message every day that he will meet them tomorrow. They pass the time engaging in comic stage business, trying to remember where they are and how they got there—as one character puts it, "Anything to give us the illusion we exist." The second act repeats the first with slight variations; Godot never arrives, and the two tramps continue to wait.Other "absurdists" include Eugene Ionesco (Rhinoceros, 1960) and Arthur Adamov (Ping Pong, 1955) in France, Harold Pinter (The Caretaker, 1959) in England, and Edward Albee (The American Dream, 1961) in the United States.In fiction, two of the best known novels of the 1950s and '60s, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961) and Gunther Grass's The Tin Drum (1959), captured the absurdist theme and style.
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