| At the turn of the 19 th and 20 th centuries,Europe,which had experienced two world wars,faced an unprecedented humanist crisis.Against the ideological background of the collapse of rationalism,existentialism reflected profoundly on the ideological impact faced by liberal capitalism.As representative figures of the existentialist trend,Jean-Paul Sartre and Milan Kundera both profoundly responded to major themes related to the existence of human beings in their respective works.Among them,absurdity and freedom as the basic concepts of existentialist philosophy form the base of their creative works.Starting from the literary writings of Sartre and Kundera on the themes of absurdity and freedom,the thesis focuses on the way these two themes unfold in their literary creations,in order to explore their respective reflections on the question of human being,and then analyze and compare the differences in the literary and artistic thoughts behind their respective texts.The thesis first traces the origins of the existentialist thought of Sartre and Kundera.At the level of reality,the European humanistic crisis has led modern people to question and reflect on the spirit of the times and the state of individual existence;at the level of philosophical thought,the existentialist trend,formed by philosophers from Kierkegaard,Nietzsche,Husserl and Heidegger has provided them with a way of thinking to understand the diversity and contradictions of existence;at the level of literary practice At the level of literary practice,the concern for the "forgotten being" is embedded in the European novel of more than 400 years since Cervantes.These are the sources of Sartre’s and Kundera’s existentialist literary and artistic thoughts.The second and third parts of the thesis analyze their writing on the two themes of absurdity and freedom in the context of the texts.The first is the textual presentation of absurdity: Sartre sees absurdity as the essential contradiction between man and the world,so the absurdity in his literature is somewhat universal,phenomenologically reduced,absolute and unaffected by any situation,and the root of this absurdity lies in the contingency of existence;while in Kundera’s case,absurdity arises from the "ultimate paradoxical state" that man is caught in."The absurdity in his works emphasizes the intrinsic nature of man,and he believes that absurdity stems from the illusion of the individual,that is,the existence of a world of absolute truth,in which man can grasp the ultimate truth that controls everything,and thus fall into the cycle of absurdity in concrete life.Sartre and Kundera also explore freedom in their literature: the freedom in Sartre’s text is absolute,and he sees freedom as the essential provision of human-human is freedom,and this freedom stems from negation,and human finds freedom in anxiety,escapes freedom in self-deception,or realizes freedom in free choice;the freedom embodied in Kundera’s text Human freedom,on the other hand,is relative and powerless.In his work,human is a thoroughly finite being,whose activity of existence unfolds in time.The existence of the individual is fundamentally relative,and therefore the individual cannot find a definitive support in concrete life,which keeps him in the unbearable void of life at all times.Only by seeking a balanced fulcrum between lightness and weight can the individual enable himself to weave the web of meaning of life and thus continue to live.The fourth part of the thesis proceeds to explore the differences between Sartre’s and Kundera’s literary and artistic thoughts,namely the different understandings of "existence" carried by their texts on absurdity and freedom of writing.Sartre focuses on revealing the original face of man and the world,calling for human freedom,calling on people to create the meaning of existence based on their own freedom,and pervading an optimistic and heroic spirit;while Kundera’s creative thought is more darkly humorous than Sartre’s,focusing on a kind of uncertain wisdom,using humorous strokes to express the complexity of human events and reveal the relativity of truth,in order to guide people to He focuses on a kind of uncertain wisdom,expressing the complexity of human events and revealing the relativity of truth with humorous strokes,in order to lead people back to the essence of existence,to understand human life itself and the possibilities of human existence.Through a comparison of Sartre’s and Kundera’s existentialist writings,the thesis sorts out the different ways of presenting the two major existentialist themes,absurdity and freedom,in their texts,and uses them to explore the differences between Sartre’s and Kundera’s ideas of literary creation: Sartre tries to bridge the gap between the finite and the infinite,he gives human existence a completely negative nothingness,and at the same time,human beings gain the absolute He gives man’s existence a completely negative nothingness,and at the same time,man obtains absolute freedom,and man must always realize his freedom and bear all the consequences and responsibilities in his intervention in reality,existence is a burden that human has to bear;Kundera,on the other hand,believes that human’s being is absolutely finite,being is essentially temporal,human cannot find essential certainty and support in life,thus human’s being is suspended in nothingness,and the individual wants to add weight to his own emptiness,and the only way he can do so is to seek some balanced fulcrum between lightness and weight.This paper focuses on the differences between Sartre and Kundera in their literary and artistic thoughts,which helps researchers to understand existentialist literature and philosophical thought in a more three-dimensional and pluralistic perspective;at the same time,their different responses to the plight of individual existence help researchers to reflect on the state of human existence in a more general sense. |
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