The Absurd Life,the Anguishing Exploration——A Study Of The Theatre Of The Absurd

In the 1950s, a new school of drama appeared in France and then came into vogue in Europe as well as in America. In 1961, Martin Esshn, an English theatrical theorist, entitled this dramatic school as the Theatre of the Absurd according to its artistic claims and characteristics It is against the traditional drama from form to content, for this reason, it is called 揳nti-theatre?However, its influence spreads to all the capitalist world and becomes the most important postwar dramatic school in the West. It is like an exotic flower in the garden of the Western literature The author of this thesis, on the basis of Marxist literary theory, systematically expounds this school from the social and historical viewpoint. This paper is composed of six chapters. The first chapter is the introduction to the Theatre of the Absurd In the Theatre of the Absurd, the meaning of the word bsurd s different from that in the dictionary, and Irom that used in daily life It has its profound meaning In his famous essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus gives his affluent explanation about this word In the history of the development of literature, the tradition of dbsurd exists all the time, but it appears in different forms It, in addition to some modernist literary schools such as the Dadaist and the Surrealist, bis more or less influence on the Theatre of the Absurd 1)uring theVevolutlon from the tradltlon of "absurd" to the absurd l1terature, the TheatTeof the Absurd ls the most perfect fOrm to comblne and unlfy the absurdfOrm wlth the absurd themeThe second chapter analyzes the soclal background of the 'rheatre ofthe Absurd The soc1ety has undergone tremendous change frOm theestabl1shment of lhe bourgeo1b leg1m~ l11 .:,. 19t11 century to the outbreak of"'p WOrld Wa II ln the 20th centUry Espec1ally ln the short years of the20th century people exPerienced tWo unprecedented calamltles andwltuessed the devastat1ng economc crisls All thls left a deep trauma forthe Westerners and plunged them to be 1n a deep splritua1 cns1s They beginto susPect the extam soclal order and recons1der the tfadltlonaI bellef andva1ue. And thus, such feelmgs as nlhlllsm, pesslrmsm and cynlc1sm arereflected ln some postWar l1terary schools lncludlng the Theatre of theAbsurdThe thlrd chaPter dlscusses the phllosophlcal basls of the Theatre ofthe Absurd-xlstCflt1allsm ExlStentlallsm, whlch has an lnfluence onvarious llterary schools lncluding the Theatre of the Absurd, 1s a veryprevalellt modern phllosophy ln the West To the existeflt1a1lsts, the"ex1stence" refers to the exlstence of "self', that ls the ex1stence or be1ng ofan 1ndlvldual who ls the subJect of wlll and act1on. Th1s makes up the bas1sand sted1ng polnt of lts Whole ph1losophy There are Cdrist1anexlstentlallsm and the athelstlc existentlallsm The former belleves that the VI一only Way out for man is to choose God; whlle the later, represented bySartTC, denies the existCnce of God. The existentlalists uphold threeproPositions: (l) The world is absurd, so the ex1stence ls absurd (2)Exlstence precedes essence. (3) Man 1s free to choose BecauseexlStentlal1sm can name the unnamable, 1t can tru1y and profoundly m1rrorthe main charactenstlc of the sPlritual llfe--the extreme pess1mlsm ln thecaPitaliSt society Therefore, the concern for man's s1tuatlon, the evaluat1onof llfe and the pos1tlon of man 1n the world constltute the phllosoph1ca1basis of the Theatre of the Absurd.The fourth chaPer analyzes the maln character1st1cs of the Theatre ofthe Absurd. The dramatistS of the Absurd do not form a unlfiedorganizaton, nor do they have a common declaratlon, but thelr worksspontaneously reflect such themes as the meanlnglessness, absurd1tymisery and hopelessness of I1fe, the allena...