A cheerful nihilism: Absurdity and humor in contemporary American fiction.

The belief that ours is an absurd world is a commonplace of contemporary American fiction. Many novelists writing after World War II depict the Existentialist view of absurdity comically by making it the subject of a grand joke rather than a cause for despair. The fiction of Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, and Saul Bellow represent three contemporary comic responses to the Existentialist conception of absurdity. Though the experience of absurdity cannot be eradicated in modern life, these novelists seem to say, one can often discover an effective response through humor. This is the response I am calling cheerful nihilism. Comic technique as well as the treatment of existential themes presents a world view which is simultaneously comic and absurd. In Catch-22 Joseph Heller mixes satire and absurdity: the military bureaucracy becomes the target of social satire and Yossarian's anarchic exuberance represents a means to survive in the face of its pervasive absurdity. The relation between the author's depiction of an absurd world and the character's humorous response suggests a means to accommodate that perception of absurdity. The comic multiplicity of meaning that overwhelms Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49 belies any cohesive ontological order. Yet the bewildering proliferation of experience also provides endless possibilities of meaning which defy entropy. Absurdity, in Pynchon's view, is more a possibility to be explored than a condition to be dreaded. Saul Bellow explores the comic possibilities of absurdity encountered by the individual in his or her everyday life. At the end of The Adventures of Augie March Augie feels the spirit of laughter rising up in him at all the rough forces of his life. He laughs partly at the incongruity of his dreams and the experience that thwarts them, and partly in the face of fate by refusing to lead a disappointed life. Augie's laughter implies the response indicated by cheerful nihilism: for the author it assumes a stance that acknowledges both the disappointing and creative aspects of the absurd, and for the character it provides an effective response to absurdity and one means to act in the face of irreconcilable alternatives.Ph.D.American literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsModern literatureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/128423/2/9013929.pd