Existentialism in Plays: Sartre and Gabriel Marcel - Research Paper

Introduction

Several of the existentialists are famous play writers. Perhaps, Sartre is the best known in the U.S as demonstrated in his No Exit, The Respectful Prostitute, and, The Flies. Lesser popular are the plays of Gabriel Marcel. Besides, to the theater, novels and short stories function as a literary means of transmitting philosophical viewpoint (Crowell, 2012).The easiness of a play has more extensive impacts than an intellectual philosophical treatise such as Sartre's Being and Nothingness. A novel provoke insightful thinking in a manner which an essay in philosophy cannot not. Furthermore, Marcel articulates on this "One might nevertheless say that it is the function proper to drama to arouse secondary reflection in us.'' Not all existentialists have been literary individual generating for the theater. Other approaches such as journals and allegory serves a significant media for Kierkegaard and Marcel. These focused strategies to communication need not to be eliminated the straight-forward direct communication of notions alongside conventional philosophical techniques of argumentation. It is clear that a decent description of existentialism is challenging to generate since existentialism is by nature of the movements against narrow, hard-bound categories.

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Significance of the Study

Nevertheless, graphic novels are remarkably diverse, in terms of not only their content but also their practicality. For instance, Gorman (2002) records those graphic novels are accurately what young people are looking for: they are challenging, fascinating, engaging, and, motivating. Schwartz(2004) argue that graphic novel is pleasing since they enable teachers to go into the culture of young people and student's to bring their outside experience into the classroom. Such novels aim to channel the gap between student's school literacy and the techniques in which they utilize reading and writing outside of school. Graphic novels have also been employed effectively with students with disabilities, students who are challenged with reading, and English learners (Frey & Fisher, 2004). One of the models behind the utilization of graphic novels for challenged teenagers readers emphasizes on their effectiveness in presenting challenging notions while minimizing the reading needs, as a consequence of all student can considerately confer the content at hand. There is existentialism crisis that faces graphic novels. Thus, the purpose of this study is to discuss the existentialism crisis on graphic novels with the aid of the following research questions

Research Questions

1. Must life have a meaning to be lived?'
2. Is absurdity at the heart of Existentialism?
3. Is Existentialism 'the least immoral, most theoretically austere' of all teachings?

The Objective of the Study

1. To determine whether life must have a meaning to be lived.
2. To find out whether absurdity is at the heart of existentialism
3. To find out is the least immoral

Methodology of the Study

To attain the objectives of the study, this research will carry out two main activities. The first will be scoping of the existing data. Scoping is figuring out what precisely to examine for a study. It is a Goldilocks challenge: that a researcher is not needed to scope too broad, or will not view sequence appearing in the information, but she/he does not also need it too narrow, or the respondents will tell the researcher every detail they have in about five minutes. That is why scoping existing information through a systematic review of the existing of the topic would be significant. The second activity will be conducting a cross-sectional survey. A cross-sectional survey gathers data to make inferences regarding populace of interest at one point in time.

Potential Challenge of the Study

Non- response is a significant challenge affecting cross-sectional researches and can lead to biasness of the measure of the outcome. Cross-sectional entails looking at individuals who differ on one dominant trait at one particular point in time (Setia, 2016); this challenge can emerge when the features of non-responses vary from responders.

Strength of Using Cross-Section Survey Method

Using cross-section study method offers this research the following benefit:

1. Relatively quick and easy to carry out since it has no long duration of following up.
2. Able to evaluate frequency for all aspects under examination.
3. Manifold experiences can be investigated
4. Good for descriptive analyses and for producing hypotheses

Literature Review

Kupczak, (2000) claims that existentialism is a philosophy which became famous in the 1940s, stressing person liberty's in the face of Fascism. The source of existentialism as a philosophy is frequently ascribed to the concepts of Heidegger, Husserl, and, Jaspers. The philosophy became more clearly defined through the works of Kierkegaard, Nietchze, and specifically Jean-Paul Satre.

Existentialists are frequently seemed as highly realistic that makes it's an attracting philosophy for a pragmatic discipline. Existentialism concentrates on questions regarding how human experience life (Guignon, & Pereboom, 2001). Individual freedom and the capability to question are two basic existentialist truisms. Human existence is influenced by an existentialist view, majorly by human actions, though it spreads to the extent of recognizing limit beings cannot manage.

Sartre (1974) point out that, when the French Philosopher and an author Gabriel Marcel gave a description Jean-Paul Sartre in 1955 as an existentialist, Sartre commented that his philosophy is a philosophy of existence; further claiming that he does not understand what existentialism is despite having written an article named A More Precise Definition of Existentialism many months prior for Action magazine. The subsequent year, in reaction to criticism of his play, The Respectful Prostitute, portraying racism in the American South, he declared that he is not anti-American and he does not know what it means. Nevertheless, in the same year, regardless of his negations and professed perplexity, Sartre proposed a philosophy he known as existentialism with which his mane would become virtually identical and was frequently enthusiastically anti-American in his perspectives (Friedman, 2011). The notion of existentialism as to some extent opposing American culture became conventional during this period and then became engrained to the extent that American existentialism is sometimes deliberated as an oxymoron, allegedly. Americans lack the European sensibilities which have generated great existentialist authors. Sartre eminently remarked that pessimism is lacking in the U.S concerning human nature and social organization. Besides, Camus commented that America is a nation where everything is conducted to evidence that life is not catastrophic and was disapproving of the US materialism and its triviality. According to Direk (2011), Simone de Beauvoir, wrote that the majority of the U.S citizens are frightened of themselves, and of cold separation which dereliction into which man falls when he breaches off from what is considered as a representing them mentally and culturally adamant if not resistant to existentialism since from this parting the drama of human existence is born; without the pang leaving the scene is not genuinely human, lacking awareness, and, liberty. Comprehended to comprise both the zealous anti-theological Christianity of Kierkegaard and the vociferous atheism of Satre, existentialism, nevertheless, confronts easy definition. Hostility, torment, and, legitimacy are thematic concerns of existentialist writing.

Moreover, on top of the three As' nonetheless, Edgar and Sedgwick (2007) claim that, Walter Kaufman acknowledges responsiveness of the four Ds' common to such writing death, dread, despair, and, dauntlessness. Like Beauvoir, Sartre, considered this consciousness to be mostly non- American, since America culture was saturated by boundless myths of pleasure, of growth, of freedom, its individuals fortified to pursue a life of rosy easiness by the media and entertainment industry, to be predictably happy and to perceive their society as least historical in the universe, never obfuscating its challenges with innate customs and learned rights (De Beauvoir, 2004). These principles were by no chance limited to Europeans existentialist and American Criticizer Frederick R. Karl, for instance, affirmed in 1983 that:

''Existentialism is meaningful literarily only where death (time, mortality, inescapability) is an ever-present reality, not in a society where it can be disguised with all the pleasures of wealth and ingenuity in the end, the American believes he can conquer death, just as in coming to the new world as a settler, pioneer, or immigrant he placated the devil.''(Karl, 1983)

This perception is grounded on an essential assumption that is a narrative vastness and complete of history and time innate in the U.S culture and by allowance American fiction and that the inwardness, the sternness, and baldness of European existential writing is negating to such fiction. The impact in the existentialism of the 19450s and 1950s on the U.S fiction is, nevertheless, acknowledged by Karl Albeit as minimized and adjusted for American perception. The U.S novels of the 1950s, he implies, addressed existential agony, but required transcendence of the illogical and so generated a type of failed existentialism. Walter Kaufman's anthology Existentialism: from Dostoevsky to Sartre, issued in 1956, was immensely dominant and offered (Lips-Wiersma, & Mills, 2014).

The U.S readers with a reachable overview of existentialism at a time when Sartre in specific was literarily trendy. The literary trend delight in Sartre and Camus in America and the effect of their fiction in specific, influences novels of this area. Generally, urban fiction, featuring alienated and isolated protagonists, searching for selfhood and self- knowledge (Sartre, 2001). Perhaps most prominent amongst these were Richard Wrights' The Outsider(1952), Ralph Ellison's Invisible mans, saturated with Sartre, the latter written in exile, and, Kierkegaard, its name a crucial tribute to Camus, The Outsider(1942), such Novels, nevertheless, inclined to be perceived as a type of uprooted existentialism, a poor synthetic of the origin novels. Karl considers other novels such as Saul Bellow's The Victim (1947), J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951), and, Seize the Day (1956) as representative of the U.S failed existentialism of this time. Nonetheless, it was in inhabited instead of in urban fiction of the 1960s and decades of the 20th century which the impact of Sartrean existentialism was most philosophical: Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road(1961), Walker Percy's The Moviegoer(1961), John Cheever's Bullet Park(1969), Joyce Carol Oates' Expensive People (1961), John Updike's 'Rabbit' tetralogy, Joseph Heller's Something Happened(1974), Raymond Carver's short stories, and, Richard Ford's Bascombe'novels, Ann Beattie's Falling in Place (1980), and, Change-are Lee's A Gesture Life(1999) and all are sample of form od American existentialism, one which could barely be terminated as just an adulterated and imitative failure. All were impacted by European existentialism both in direct and indirect form and all examined existentialist themes in the setting of American Suburbia, its liminality and indeterminacy offering the indispensable cultural and existential imbalance to explore such themes.

The author of the graphic novels and short narratives discussed in this research were majorly under the influence by literary ex...