Samskara as an Existential Novel: A Critique

Abstract

Abstract

sm is about being saint without God; being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society. Anita Brookner Existentialism was unknown until Kierkegaard and Sartre introduced it to the literary world. Existentialism is a philosophical theory which deals with one’s search for meaning in life. The key words of this theory are existence and essence. The theory explores that a person changes according to the experiences one experiences in life. Existentialism is connected to the irrationalities and uncertainties of life where a character turns utterly absurd and confused as nothing seems to be clear and permanent. The past, the present and the future remain unconnected for the character. In existentialism the character alienates one’s own self and tries to occupy another. Existentialism gets its name from an insistence that a human life is understandable only in terms of an individual man’s existence, his particular experience of life. It says that a man lives rather than is, and that everyman’s experience of life is unique, radically different from everyone else’s and can be understood truly, only in terms of his involvement in life or commitment to it; from the outside a man appears to be just another natural creature, from the inside he is an entire universe, the center of infinity. The existentialist insists upon this latter radically subjective view and from this grows much rest of existentialism.