/lit/ - Literature

The Stranger, Nausea, American Psycho

junky

Notes from the Underground
No longer Human

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard. It's a short play that's brilliant, witty, and chilling, in the end.

Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse

It says exactly the opposite but was written during Hesses suicidial phase in life.

>>5107312

try pretty much anything by Paul Bowles, The Sheltering sky, Let It Come Down, and The Spider's House in particular

The Stranger/Outsider is the quintessential piece of existentialist literature (though Camus denies that it's existential at all)

>>5107312
Endgame, by Samuel Beckett
"The Trial" (and everything else), by Franz Kafka
The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster

>>5107409

this is a great one OP

... except for the fact that it invented the manic pixie dream girl. The first half is GOAT though

>>5107597
The ending is the best though.

The Trial

Ignore anyone who recommends Sartre/Camus

The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy

>>5107559
>The Stranger/Outsider is the quintessential piece of existentialist literature (though Camus denies that it's existential at all)

Because it's not Existential: it's Absurdist.

THEY'RE NOT THE SAME THING.

>>5107597
>... except for the fact that it invented the manic pixie dream girl.

That is a disgraceful reading, Hermine could just as well be the metaphysical gemellin, which is a type as old as the Dioscures.

>>5107312
>Can anybody recommend any novels that have a sort of bleak existential theme or undertone?

Why the hell would you want to read something like that? Go read something to cheer you up. The Harry Potter books are always something that makes me happy, so you can check those out. Don't listen to /lit/ when they tell you if it's for plebs, they don't consider books with plots and lovable characters to be true literature.

>>5107625

But I don't know what that is, anon.

She does, however, fit the description of a MPDG, so that's how I think of her.

>>5107629
A kind of mystical doble, if you will. Hermine is not some quirky hot chick that the narrator happens to meet casually. She's the mirror of his own trouble, she's another Self. Think of Beatrix for Dante (not a doble, but a mystical inspirer), Enkidu for Gilgamesh, Castor for Pollux.

The most concise way to describe it would be to say she's the narrator's spiritual twin.

1984

"Spring Snow" by Yukio Mishima.
All the feels.

>>5107312

The Stranger - Camus

>>5107643

Interesting. Sort of like his anima?

I still found the inclusion of her character corny. The answer was too simple; felt like he dissolved into a puddle of hedonism. (Existential despair? No problem! Dance and take drugs and have sex! See? All better!)

>>5107312
Nausea by Sartre

Either/Or by Kierkegaard

>>5107312
The Drinker, Hans Fallada
Ever Man Dies Alone, Hans Fallada
The Flowers of Evil; Baudelaire

>>5107772
> Sort of like his anima?
Pretty much. That's not to say she's not a real person, but she plays the same role as an anima.

>(Existential despair? No problem! Dance and take drugs and have sex! See? All better!)

The point is precisely that there is enough to enjoy in bodily pleasures, that learning how to dance and to have sex is not a worthless, unspiritual practice, but can be the answer to a lack of spirituality. But if you read closely the work it's not so easy. The narrator hasn't quite come to a solution in the end, he knows what he should strive for, he's not yet at it.

Pascal, Dostoievsky, Kierkegaard for le Christian feel of nothingness.

Rather than listing works in the Walter Kaufmann - approved works of existentialism, I'm going to post outside of the box a bit.

I highly recommend The Golden Bowl by Henry James. While it is a love story, it is kind of like "true love vs. social structuration of the marriage bond." Social structure wins the day. Maggie Verver is a bitch. I hate her. I guess I'm a hopeless romantic. There is some existential underpinnings because even though Maggie wins the day and gets what she thinks she wants, she drives a permanent wedge between her and what she really wants. Existential love: futile social victories in battles while we lose the war.

And Ecclesiastes is better than anything suggested in the thread that has an explicitly existential theme. It is beautiful. Looking elsewhere is "like chasing the wind."

>>5107772
>Existential despair? No problem! Dance and take drugs and have sex! See? All better!

You completely missed the point of the book. Maybe reading through this quote might help you understand what the book/the ending was about.

Man designs for himself a garden with a hundred kinds of trees, a thousand kinds of flowers, a hundred kinds of fruit and vegetables. Suppose, then, that the gardener of this garden knew no other distinction between edible and inedible, nine-tenths of this garden would be useless to him. He would pull up the most enchanting flowers and hew down the noblest trees and even regard them with a loathing and envious eye. This is what the Steppenwolf does with the thousand flowers of his soul. What does not stand classified as either man or wolf he does not see at all.

>>5107809

I really enjoyed your thematic synopsis.

>>5107839
I'm not on /lit/ to write a thematic synopsis. It was just obvious that the person i quoted got the wrong idea of the book and the quote i posted is basically what Steppenwolf is about. A man that reduces himself to Steppenwolf and Mensch and fails to see all the things that are inside him, all the beauty of the world and life. The infinite possibilities that hide behind every door and what might happen if we would find the courage to open them.

>>5107627
Why would anyone over the age of 12 want to read Harry Potter? Oh right, nostalgia.

Run along woman, the boys are talking.