Looking at the course as a whole, one of the major themes that has cropped up in almost all of the books we've read has been the futility of life, or the meaninglessness of the main characters' actions. This is something that's always been a common theme in literature, even back to things like Oedipus Rex or the original myth of Sisyphus. However, it seems like it's an idea that's gotten more prevalent within the last century or so, and almost all of the books we've read touch on it to some extent.
The most obvious place to start is with The Stranger, which is basically an entire book about the futility of most of the things people worry about on a day to day basis. While reading essays for my research paper I came across a lot of information about Camus that really illustrated his opinions on everyday life. One of the more interesting ideas of his that doesn't shine through all that much in the novel is that "the quantity of life is more important than the quality of life." At first this seems contradictory with the scene in which Meursault says that "it doesn't matter much whether you die at thirty or seventy," but you can see how it fits with other parts of the novel. When Meursault talks about how it doesn't matter the way he lived his life, and that it would have been no different had he lived his life one way or the other, he is essentially saying that the way you live your life doesn't matter; life is good no matter what. As he tells the chaplain, every living person is "privileged," because they are given a short time in which they are still alive, even if they are all "condemned" to death. Looking at things that way can help explain a lot of why Meursault acts the way he does; if there's no point to any action and just being alive is more important than anything you do while you are, then it makes a lot of sense to just sit in bed smoking cigarettes and eating chocolate, since you can just do whatever feels good in the moment.
This idea of futility, that it doesn't matter what you do so you might as well just do what you want, isn't one that's shared by most of the other authors we've looked at so far. The closest one is probably Nicholson Baker's philosophy in The Mezzanine, but that novel's tone and scope are both very very different than The Stranger's. Baker does seem to believe that the enjoying yourself is more important than acting in the way people might expect, and Howie's quest seems specifically selected to be the most futile imaginable (when the shoelaces inevitable break again in a couple years, he'll buy new ones from the same job and the escalator he takes upstairs from CVS will still be running the exact same way as it always has been). Both novels also revel in the small, personal moments where the main characters take some minor pleasure in something they don't outright recognize is insignificant, but which the audience easily can, such as Meursault's salt advertisement or any of Howie's footnotes.
A parallel character trait can be found in Gregor Samsa, who keeps the picture of a woman in a fur boa on his wall, but in that case it means something quite different. Kafka definitely believed in the futility of human endeavor, but he's different from Baker and Camus in that he doesn't see anything in the struggle to enjoy. He just turns Samsa into a bug to make his life go from insignificant in one way to insignificant in another, and you get the feeling that no one else is better off. Kafka also believes it doesn't really matter what you do, but he means for that truth to manifest itself as a grinding depression, whereas Camus wants it to be an assurance that you can act how you want to act, at least without bothering others.
The last novel I want to look at is possibly the most interesting in this case: Song of Solomon (although Mrs. Dalloway and Wide Sargasso Sea could also both be good). In Song of Solomon, people take personal events very seriously -- even events that happened 30 years before the novel opens. In fact, when Milkman calls everyone around him "crazy," that's really what he means: people take things that don't matter (in his opinion) way, way too seriously. Guitar even calls him out on not caring about racial issues and he barely responds. Instead, Milkman cares about doing what makes him feel good, even if that means stepping on his family and friends for years to get his way, as Lena informs him. However, this ends up backfiring for him: he decides that what will feel good is to leave home and his father's shadow, which requires money, which requires him finding the gold. However, his quest to find the gold ends up aging him from his old, adolescent self, and changing him more and more into Macon Dead II, as he does his father's bidding, operates from the same place as his father (greed), and more importantly, assumes his father's history, which he never had any interest in before coming there. Therefore, when Milkman goes to unreasonable lengths to accomplish something (break away from his dad), he ends up accomplishing the opposite (he becomes his dad). This theme, of people getting too passionate about things and causing the opposite to occur, happens over and over again in Song of Solomon. We see it with Ruth's love powder, with Milkman's attempt to get rid of Hagar and with her attempts to kill him, with Macon's telling his son to stay away from Pilate, and so on. This is a different kind of futility than the kind we see in the other novels from this class, in that people do have the power to change things -- however, they don't have the power to control exactly how things are going to change.
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