The Loneliness Under The Absurd Situation

In the literature, loneliness has always been one of the important topics. Especially in the 20th century narrative works, loneliness had become the theme landscape and many writers had expressed their depth thinking on this subject, including Kafka and Camus.Kafka and Camus are two representatives of Western Modern Literature. These two writers were highly comparable in terms of the influence study and parallel study. In this paper, we use the "loneliness" as the theme combined with the two writers’ narrative works and try to restore their life circumstances. What we want is to explore the similarities and differences between the two writers’ attitudes and the coping styles about humanity "lonely" situation.This paper is divided into four parts:The first part is to define the "loneliness" and state it from two different aspects: a physical "lonely feeling" and philosophical "lonely existence". After a analysis and comparison of this two different concepts, we could clarify the relationship between "loneliness "and" absurdity ".That is, "absurdity" emphasizes a breaking between the human and the world when "loneliness "is about the individual feeling.The second part discusses the "lonely theme" in Kafka’s and Camus’s works. Firstly, Ⅰ introduced the two writers’ lonely feeling in their personal life, and then we focused our mind on the "loneliness" in the performance of their works. And we could divide it into two aspects: "the allegorical mode" and "the realistic mode". And we can know what are the similarities and differences between the two writers’works.The third part is around the two writers’attitude and coping style about loneliness, which is one of the focuses of this paper. Kafka had the sense of guilt which made him worry about the mankind loneliness, and he finally selected the immanent divinity in man to solve the problem; Camus regarded the "loneliness" as human beings’signs of awakening, but he didn’t recognize it as a solution to face the absurdity. He stressed the solidarity and love to digest the loneliness.In the last part we analyze the reasons for the writers’different views about the human "lonely condition". We discussed it from three aspects: the attitude to life, the purpose of writing and the different ideas for philosophers. What we want is to deepen the understanding about the attitude towards loneliness in this two writers’ mind.