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The Thing of It Is, We Must Live with the Living

The Medium Is the Massage, pp. 94-96

John Walter, Author
Introduction, page 7 of 10
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Theater of the Absurd

"Today, similar fears are expressed in the Theater of the Absurd."

The Theater of the Absurd was a movement within theater in the late 1950s that focused on absurdism, a response to the disconnect between the human search for meaning and a meaningless universe. In Absurdist plays the focus is not on a sequence of scenes that tell a story but, instead, "a pattern of images presenting people as bewildered beings in an incomprehensible universe" (Holman and Harmon 2). The movement was influenced by the works of Sartre and Camus, and its vision is perhaps best articulated in Camus' The Myth of Sisphus in which he presents life as absurd in its meaninglessness and stresses "the destructive nature of time, the feeling of solitude in a hostile world, the sense of isolation from other human beings" (Cuddon 968).

Famous plays within the Theater of the Absurd tradition include:
  • Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros
  • Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot
  • Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
  • Jean Genet's The Maids
  • Harold Pinter's The Room
  • Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Gildenstern are Dead
Works Cited
Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 3rd ed. London: Penguin Books, 1992.

Holman, C. Hugh, and William Harmon. A Handbook to Literature. 6th ed. New York: Macmillan, 1992.

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The Medium Is the Massage, pp. 94-95    Clash of Technologies    Common Failure    Pages 94-95

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