硕士学位论文 约翰.巴斯《路尽头》中的伦理悲剧
专 业 名 称： 英语言文学 研 究 方 向： 英美文学 论文提交时间： 2013年4月 论 文 编 号： The Ethic Tragedy in John Barth’s The End of the Road
by
A thesis
submitted to the Graduate School
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
in
English Language and Literature
摘 要
约翰.巴思(1930- ),出生在马里兰州,于20世纪50年代早期成为了大学的一名写作老师。从上世纪五十年代末，六十年代初开始，约翰.巴思被认为是新兴的带有荒诞主义色彩的作家。大部分学者认为，约翰.巴思与约瑟夫.海勒，冯古纳特，托马斯.品钦等作家的联系并不太紧密，因为约翰.巴思的作品被大多数学者贴上了存在主义，荒诞主义，黑色幽默的标签。随着现代主义文学在美国的兴起，美国文学开始从以意识流为中心朝着自我反省和定义的方向发展。巴思认为，自我是认识这个世界的基础，巴思在他的小说中运用角色的自我反省，向读者展示了现实社会生活背后的空虚。
新一代美国小说家对爱因斯坦的相对论及量子物理学表现除了狂热的兴趣, 约翰.巴思也不例外。在约翰.巴思的小说《路尽头》中，他笔下的主人在寻找事物的意义的时候，没有运用爱因斯坦相对论，承认宇宙间的一切事物都是相对的，而是极具悲剧色彩地陷入了寻找万物背后绝对意义的荒诞怪圈。受到欧洲现代主义作家加缪，萨特和贝克特的影响, 约翰.巴思的头两部作品：《漂浮的歌剧院》以及《路尽头》都充斥着存在主义和虚无主义的悲剧色彩。在《路尽头》这部小说中，现代主义“认知痛苦”的思想被小说主角雅各布陷入宇宙无序状态的痛苦经历展现地淋漓尽致。
在他的小说《路尽头》里，他的主角们都无法在一个荒谬，充满不确定性的世界里给自己的身份作出定义。对他们而言，任何事情都是没有理性和逻辑理由的，这恰恰体现了萨特的存在主义伦理学。巴思的这部小说中同样体现出了他对女性角色所遭遇问题关心和描述。大部分学术研究都笼统地巴思的这篇小说是属于存在主义小说，并没有对文中体现的三种不同存在主义伦理悲剧进行细分，也没有给出这种悲剧背后的深层原因。而本文作者则认为巴思其实用三个主人公，体现了三种不同的存在主义伦理悲剧来证明存在主义的荒谬性。本文作者对《路尽头》中的存在主义伦理悲剧进行了细分，并且通过了逻辑推理后认为：《路尽头》这篇小说中的三个主人公实际上体现了三种不同的存在主义伦理悲剧：1，失去主观能动性，无法找到自己的身份及事物的意义；2，没有独立的主观能动性和人格，被他人物化；3，主观能动性过强，认为自己主观建立的价值体系便是绝对真理，并强迫他人遵循自己的主观价值体系。除此之外，本文作者还提出假设：认为导致《路尽头》这篇小说主人公的伦理悲剧的原因是由于自由和责任间的平衡被破坏而导致的责任感的缺失和女性人格的物化。
关键词：女性主义伦理学；物化；存在主义伦理学；身份危机；自由；责任
Abstract
John Barth (1930- ) was born in Maryland and became a college writing teacher in the early 1950s and has been labeled as the new novelist with absurd factors in his fiction. The majority of the scholars hold the opinion that there has no close relationship between John Barth and other novelist like Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. for they regarded John Barth as existentialist and absurdist. With the spread of modern literature in America, some American writers stopped their focus on consciousness and directed toward self-reflection and self-definition. According to Barth, he believes that self is the foundation of understanding the world; he uses his protagonists to represent the emptiness behind the social humbugs.
The new American novelists including John Barth show their crazy towards Einsteinian Relativity and quantum physics. In John Barth’s The End of the Road, Barth’s characteristics have sunk into the absurd dilemma of finding the absolute meaning of the universe and they turned the blind eyes to Einsteinian Relativity. Influenced by European writers like Camus, Beckett and Sartre, the existentialist factors are obvious in John Barth’s first two woks: The Floating Opera and The End of the Road. The “Epistemic Trauma” in modernism has been presented to readers through the dilemma of Jacob Horner who has been caged in the cosmopsis. Cosmopsis is the key word in The End of the Road, which means that one who has the broad view of things can think of nothing to do that accomplishes anything. But cosmopsis also means the realization that nothing is worth doing and no human act has any value, thus ethics is not properly a discipline for human study (Tharpe 1974).
In his novel, The End of The Road, the characters have lost in the dilemma of defining themselves in the absurd and unstable world. For them, nothing has the rational and logical reasons and this is the representation of Sartre’s existentialist ethics. The majority of the previous literature just gave out the general argumentation that The End of the Road belongs to the existentialist novels but scarce literature has explore the reasons behind the dilemma of the protagonists. In addition to this, they just categorized the ethical tragedies of the three protagonists into one kind but the author of this thesis argues that they are actually three different ethical tragedies: 1, the totally loss of the subjective initiative; 2, the loss of independent subjective initiative and identity; 3, excessively strong subjective initiative to the extent that to compel others to obey one’s own subjective value system. Furthermore this thesis extends the exploration for the deep reasons behind the position of ethical tragedies. The author of this thesis gives out the hypothesis that Barth’s characters’ disability to balance the relationship between freedom and responsibility; the objectifications of women are the reasons behind their ethical tragedies.
Key words：feminist ethics; objectification; existentialist ethics; freedom; responsibility
TABLE OF CONTENTS
HYPERLINK l “_Toc263513253” Introduction1
HYPERLINK l “_Toc263513254” Chapter One The Identity Crisis: Existentialist Ethics10
HYPERLINK l “_Toc263513257” Chapter Two The Objectification of Woman: Feminist Ethics19
HYPERLINK l “_Toc263513260” Chapter Three Freedom and Responsibility: Existentialist Ethics 32
HYPERLINK l “_Toc263513264” Conclusion45
HYPERLINK l “_Toc263513265” Works Cited48
Introduction
John Barth was born, with his twin sister Jill, on May 27, 1930, in Cambridge, Maryland, to John Jacob Barth and Georgia Simmons. In wd wq Ini 撤消修改Barth’s HYPERLINK “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Floating_Opera”The Floating Opera (1956) and HYPERLINK “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_the_Road”The End of the Road (1958) in the early stage of his career can be classified as philosophical and ethical novels, which display that he has been influenced by existentialism. In The End of the Road, Jacob Horner has been provided with extreme objectivity and just waits for things to happen. He is a lonely soul without any family ties and tends to depend on no matter what and who comes along. In order to get himself rid of the dilemma, he seeks help from a black doctor who serves as the role of surrogate father to him. In this novel, there are two contrasting views: Jacob Horner believes that “nothing has intrinsic value” and does not have pretense of rationality. His opposite side, Joe Morgan is a cheerful nihilist called by Barth, while Joe notices that nothing has intrinsic value, he acclaims that men must act as if values were absolute. The use of these particular types of men tends to confine Barth’s use of philosophy to ethics.
(Scholes xvi) describes John Barth as “the best writer of fiction we have at present, and one of the best we have ever had.” A large amount of critics have been impressed by Barth’s work: the Sot-Weed Factor is been labeled as the twenty best American novels since 1945; the American Library Association voted Giles Goat-Boy one of the Notable Books of 1966; the National Book Committee nominated his first novel, The Floating Opera, for its 1956 award; it nominated him again for his 1968 collection of short fiction, Lost in the Funhouse, and it awarded him half of its 1972 fiction honors for his collection of novellas, Chimera; Giles Goat-Boy attracted enough readers to become a best seller. The sequence of the novels of John Barth represents how he developed as a famous novelist in the later twentieth century. Like many other fledgling peer writers, when John Barth was writing the first two novels of his earlier career, The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, in 1955, he was influenced by the French Existentialism, which plays a significant role in the American intellectual stage of 1950s. As an artist, however, Barth is able to maintain the attempt to reconcile philosophy and literature and no sacrificing one to the other. His work The Sot-Weed Factor makes Barth to be an excellent heir of the European literary tradition but he soon has the feeling to transcend this tradition.
With Barth’s books we cannot get a fully understanding of what is going on in one novel until we have read his other novels and tried to achieve a coherent view of them by putting them together. All of his novels are philosophical and been regarded as a history of philosophy when combined them together. The Floating Opera and The End of the Road focus on ethics, especially with the existentialism that exerted a great influence on Barth. As a group, these two novels present an absurd universe that everyone failed to find an intuition of his/her purpose. His next two novels, The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy, are histories of human culture and thereby also histories of philosophy. Barth becomes more interested in ethics and believes that Giles Goat-Boy is an anatomy of epistemology; Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera are with the theme of ontology and aesthetics that made Barth into a existentialist novelist who exploring for the world culture.
The absence of value and meaning in human life and the exploration for new identity and definition to replace the old has become an obsessive theme of contemporary literature. The reasons behind this phenomenon can be traced back to the end of the nineteenth century, when Nietzsche announced the death of God (Noland 47-56). Another source is Sartre’s theory about the rational and irrational possibilities such as, the negative relationship between the losses of identity and unmoral choices. In the literary history, a large amount of writers have implemented philosophical theories into literature, this is because literature can help the writers to turn the abstract and unremitting philosophy into more easily grasped certain issues, which are easier for common readers to understand.
For Barth, it is futile to write traditional realistic fiction because, firstly, all possibilities of plot have been exhausted, and secondly, realism does not exactly represent reality but a kind of true representation of the distortion that people make of life. John Barth was the first to announce that the traditional novel is dead, and that traditional novelistic resources have been exhausted. His short stories, novellas, and novels are focusing on the interaction between reader and text as well as the more fundamental questions of personal identity and the innate absurdity of human existence.
The characters in John Barth’ s The End of The Road are living in the chaos and absurdity, for they cannot find the meaning of themselves and the world. By using ethic theories, this thesis will explore the ethical problems the characters are face with this novel. Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist ethics will be applied to the discussion of the ethic tragedy of Barth’s characters. The feminist ethics of Simone de Beauvoir will also be used to analyze the suffering situation of the female characters in this novel, for the women in Barth’s The End of The Road have became the victims of the game between the male characters. Based on Sartre’s theory on freedom and responsibility an exploration of the causes of this condition will be carried out.
Literature Review
Actions have consequences, and to avoid pain the consequences should be weighed before taking action. Morgan, too thoughtful; Horner, too thoughtless (Morrell 23). (Stubbs 33) claims that although many existentialist factors have been represented in John Barth’s works, nevertheless, he has reinvented the traditional philosophical theories into the modern ones. “Existential innocence” is the key factor in John Barth’s fiction, (William 49-56) mentioned in his literature that the characteristics in the novels of John Barth are in an existential dilemma. “Rational action, therefore, is nothing more than the logical pursuit of goals established by an individual’s irrational nature […] The contradiction inherent in the basis for action only serves to acquaint Barth’ s heroes better with their identities as irrational men” (Stubbs 76). Furthermore, (Hierl 67-69) believes that John Barth can be regarded as a black humorist and satiric nihilist, who is always in the pursuit of excellent literary technics and existential theories as well. (Noland 56-58) holds the opinion that John Barth has the affinity with the moral nihilism in his fiction. The core theme of John Barth’s fiction is “the problem of existence and identity” “The essential problem of the existential hero is the establishment of identity: not only who am I? But also How Can I Be? And How Do I Continue to Be? It is really a problem of freedom; having earned a great price the courage to be, what does one then do? What does one choose?” (Tranchtenberg 12-23).
The early novels were written in the wake of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, the fiction of Samuel Beckett, and such American works as Saul Bellow’s Dangling Man (1944), Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), which showed strong existentialist influence (Ziegler 1987). Joe is a devout existentialist, whose activities neatly introduce the question whether an “as-if” philosophy is in fact different from the real thing (Majiak 3-5). According to (Smith 110), he has mentioned that learning about death or old age or questioning God’s existence would appear sufficiently traumatic. But Barth describes somewhat more specific and more elaborate experiences. Some scholars believe that Barth is concerned with the theme of illusion and reality–the question of truth. This argument has been approved by (Richard 23), who mentioned that in Barth’s view, the point is no longer to try to find reality because an attempt to discover truth is no more than making distinctions among illusions. (Tharpe 56-57) argues that “Jacob’s useless activity throughout his narrative leads to the death of Rennie and Joe’s despair, the Doctor prescribes Sciptotherapy to Jacob. Jacob then writes The End of the Road, which deals with the story of a Doctor who prescribes various therapies including Scriptotherapy and with an English teacher who knows the articulation and an incipient theory of what life-story means as a gigantic double metaphor suggesting an ethic, an aesthetic, and a metaphysics. Jacob then relives the story that he writes.” Regarding to Barth’s view about cosmopisis, (Times 89 23-26) has wrote about the opinion that Barth is a genius comedian who makes comedy of the universe by describing inconsistency, limitation, relativity and paradox. (Tharpe 12-14) argues that all things in the world fall between the ridiculous and the hilarious but they will eventually fall between ultimate valuelessness and uselessness.
In addition to this, (Ziegler 34) mentioned that Barth, in fact, tend to use the existential novel in order to create a self-reflexive issue; he tries to use a strong protagonist as an author who lives beyond the limits of Jacob’s nihilistic world, but turns out to be a paradoxical challenge for literature. With the purpose of emancipating contemporary literature from the existentialist paralysis, he finds out that it is necessary for all protagonists in his novels to find their essence as the precondition of life. (David 56) mentioned that the existentialist is about as absolutist as Christian doctrine or any other that rests on the concept of a superior power. Therefore, either Jacob or Joe presents the weaknesses of existentialism.
Theoretical Basis
In this thesis, the feminist ethics of Simon De Beauvoir will be used to analyze the woman’ s problems in The End of the Road. In her first volume, A History of Sex, Simon de Beauvoir pays attention to the ways in which women have been avoided from obtaining independent identities and destinies for themselves. Simon de Beauvoir argues throughout her work that women’s suffering is due to the acceptance of themselves as Other to men. In existentialist terminology, women are constantly in a state of stagnation, as long as social traditions privilege man’s life, allowing them to find transcendence in their actions. De Beauvoir regards this unequal state of affairs as not being predetermined, she states that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Sex may be fixed, but the definition of gender is stable, for as De Beauvoir shows that although the female species is more confined to her biological functions than the male, this dependence on the body cannot give the explanation for their secondary status throughout the history. De Beauvoir further rejects the notion that sexuality is the main determining factor in social behavior. She explains that the development of female is always shaped by fixed identities, such as The Woman in Love, The Narcissist, and The Independent Woman. In her description of the last type, de Beauvoir speculates on women’s liberation and challenges existing notions of “natural” behavior, arguing forcefully that women must have control over production and reproduction, and men and women must regard each other equally as subjects.
Since this thesis also attempts to apply Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist ethics in Barth’s novel The End of the Road, it is first of all necessary to give a brief introduction to Jean-Paul Sartre’ s theory of existentialist ethics. In the oppressive conditions of the Nazi occupation and during the embattled years following the war, Sartre insisted that everyone is responsible for what he or she does and for what he or she becomes or “makes of oneself,” no matter what the conditions are. Sartre later insisted that he always believes that “in the end one is always responsible for what is made of one” (Wylie 89-93). One thing for sure is that as the student of Hegel and Marx and as one who has suffered from physical frailty and the tragedies of the war, Sartre has obtained a deeper understanding of constraints and obstacles for human freedom. Sartre believes that his theory is very much concerned with the question of how people create self and how people try to evade responsibility.
The central question of existentialist ethics is the value and identity of human beings. According to Sartre, the essence of human and the real existence of human beings, is freedom. Furthermore, the self -freedom has no confine and is absolute; living standard in the society is totally determined by one’s free will. But the daily life has deprived our free personality, so we try to infuse our true selves into the existing style of others. That is to say, when one totally follows other’s thoughts and actions, he/she lives in a life that is absent of unique personality. But at the same time, Sartre stresses the point that the freedom can never be isolated from human beings for when one enters into the society, he has to choose his own identity and take obligation for his choices. To enjoy freedom is never an easy task, all of us have to take the heavy package of freedom. Human beings, at least, are wholly defined by their choices, acts, and values, and therefore by their ongoing responsibility.
There are three major arguments in existentialist: the first is that choice is ubiquitous because all of actions of human beings imply choices. Even when people do not choose explicitly, as they may not do in the majority of cases, their actions bear witness to an implicit choice; the second one is that although in many of their actions their choices are governed by criteria, the criteria that they employ are themselves chosen, and there are no rational grounds for such choices; the third one is that no causal explanation of their actions can be given. For Sartre it sometimes appears as each separate action expresses an individual choice, even if one does not choose, he/she has chosen not to choose. It is plausible to hold that one is free to choose the criteria by which they discriminate the true beliefs from the false ones, but only if this contention is restricted to the field of morals and religions.
Layout
This thesis will have study the ethical tragedies in Barth’ s The End of The Road and will try to find out the reasons behind these tragedies. Structurally, this thesis will be divided into five parts. The first part is the introduction, which includes a brief introduction to John Barth, his works and some relevant studies of The End of the Road. It then gives a summery of theory of existentialism ethics, the relationship between freedom and responsibility proposed by Jean-Paul Sartre and the feminist ethics proposed by Simone de Beauvoir.
Chapter One will illustrate the identity crisis in The End of the Road by using Sartre’s existentialist ethics. The immobility of Jacob Horner to make choices and define his identity for all possible choices in a variety of situations will be analyzed in detail. The author will give out the argument that Jacob has been overcame by the lost of subjective initiative. Additionally, another character Joe, who is the opposite aspect of Jacob, always claims that he can find the absolute reasons behind all things and established his own isolated subjectivity. The opposite position of Joe Morgan, who is unable to control his over strong subjective initiative will be explored as well.
Chapter Two expounds the women’ s problems in The End of the Road through analyzing the objectification of women by applying Simone de Beauvoir’s theory of feminist ethics. In the process of objectification, which is given by the male characters, the female characters have lost their independent identity and the freedom to obtain transcendence.
Chapter Three is devoted to explore the reasons behind existentialist ethic tragedies in The End of the Road. Joe and Jacob are all busy with defining their identities and values system but the same mistake they made is their isolation from the ethics they have to obey. In other words, the author of this thesis will argue that when they freely enjoy the freedom of them, they have damaged the freedom of other’s. And the relationship between the private and public ethic codes has be broken as well. Moreover, they just freely make their choices but do not want to take responsibility for their choices, they are the men who lack the awareness of responsibility and public ethics. The author of this thesis believes that this is the reason behind their dilemma of defining themselves and the world around them.
The conclusion will present the key points and the limitation of this thesis in a logical way, which might be the useful indication for future studies.
Chapter One Identity Crisis: Existentialist Ethics
The most typical representation of Sartre’s theory of existentialist ethics is moral nihilism. Sartre describes this mental position as everything is meaningless, thus no one can conduct action as long as being a rational being. The ethic tragedy as the consequence of this position is one will continue to sit and to ponder over the reasons behind everything until being moved away physically (Kalin 56-77). Indeed, this is corresponding with the dilemma of Jacob Horner, who is the protagonist in John Barth’s The End of the Road. At the beginning of the novel, Jacob Horner sitting on beach at the train station just because he cannot persuade himself to get up. He lacks the will — power to adjust situations to his existential needs and these needs begin to swallow him. The Doctor passed by said to him: “Jacob Horner, you mustn’t sit idle any longer. You will have to begin work” (5). Barth describes a universe in which people must encounter with all the big issues for which no explanation exists.
Kerner claims that Jacob has the feeling that he is “In the psychological sense” (Kerner 23). Jacob can be described as an absurdist, nihilist, antiheroic, and dangling. He told everyone around him that he is a vacuum for he is always being in empty of human emotions and feelings, what is worse, he absorbs the feelings and ideas of others as well. Being with too much awareness of finding an absolute value to choose a moral code or an action that can determine who he is, he has lost in the existentialist ethic dilemma. A man is defined by the responsibility he chooses to take, by his firm opinions. But Jacob dose not have any firm opinions, for he cannot find his responsibility and everything for him is apparently permitted, especially conflicting opinions and inconsistency. Jacob described his own situation like this “There was no reason to go to Cincinnati, Ohio. There was no reason to go to Crestline, Ohio. Or Dayton, Ohio; or Lima, Ohio. There was no reason, either, to go back to the Bradford Apartment Hotel, or for the matter to go anywhere. There was no reason to do anything” (73).
At the beginning of The End of the Road, Jacob expresses his feeling of absurdity by using the existentialist ethics. Jacob has finished his oral exam for his master’s degree and is puzzled by the question of where to pass his vacation and lost in paralysis. Jacob thinks that no choice is significant, because the action of choosing is unimportant. His uncertainty to make any choice is the consequence of this mental position. When he has arrived at the city that he wants to work in he just wandering around and described himself as “Even checking out of the Peninsula Hotel, moving to my new quarters, and arranging my belongings took but an hour and a half, after which time there was simple nothing to be done” (13). He dose not have any orientation in life and dose not know how to act except provide with people what they want. Jacob states that “I drove about aimlessly for twenty minutes and then returned to my room” (13). The key problem of Jacob’s cosmopsis is why can certain matters be so veritably true when so much appears relative? Being different from Joe and Jacob, the Doctor is not struggle with the absence of absolutes, coldness in the pursuit of rational and ethical basis for action. According to his theory system, the dilemma of knowing how to define oneself and make choices can be easily resolved as long as one accepts the belief that “Human existence precedes human essence, if either of the two terms really signifies anything; and that a man is free not only to choose his own essence buy to change it at will” (Sartre 53).
However, only the Doctor can control his amorphousness through the artificially designed method that could be applied to anyone. The Doctor plans to give him a series of therapy that is actually a process of establishing an identity to him and presenting it out more rationally and logically. The Mythotherapy used by the Doctor provides Jacob with a way of defining ego in a world that is full of chance, without being narrowly egoistic. Mythotherapy, in short is the deliberate choice of essence through bold resolve, which means that Jacob has to wear different masks under different conditions. This kind of method only makes the situation worse, for this is actually a temporary “real world” filled with a large number of possibilities and illusions. The Doctor may hold the opinion that when Jacob is able to choose from a wealth of possibilities, because of his freedom to choose from various kinds of alternatives, he might find the value of his identity. But Jacob’s condition has not been improved due to the fact that even though men are free to choose among possibilities, they are not free to transcend their responsibility as an individual.
The Doctor’s suggestion, however, is based on the codes of philosophy instead of the one of ethics, the performance that has no intrinsic values but just a means of avoiding stasis and the immobility nearly has no difference from death. The Doctor believes that his suggestions are made with specific purpose, and thus they serve as a more effective way to solve the dilemma of choice. He maintains that the more one obtains knowledge of the world, the more one feels the complexity of realizing the inadequacy of any role. The attempt to find the absolute in an unstable world totally failed due to the death of Rennie and the continuing paralysis of Jacob. In the Doctor’s theoretical system, for a man who lives in a world that is absent of absolutes, when one is lost in the woods of choices and possibilities, the best way to solve this problem is to narrow down the range of choices and find out some kind of certitude, some kind of rules even though they are arbitrary. The explanation given by the Doctor is evidently absurd, according to Einsteinian Relativity, the world is relatively stable; if people cannot give themselves a stable identity, they will be lost in the dilemma like Jacob and Joe. Therefore, we should find a unique identity that is stable enough and belongs to us for a life-long time and can determine who we are.
The author of this thesis hold the viewpoint that having too many identities is the another extreme of existentialist ethics for if people having two incompatible masks at the same time and if two masks or even more masks have been put on for too long, people will be puzzled by the uncertainty of knowing which one is our true self. Jacob cannot discover identifiable roles and identities that he must perform to function even as a minimally individual in the world. This kind of nothingness is the major point in Sartre’s existentialist ethics, which claims that nothing in the world have any sense or reason. When he awakes up one morning, he gets the feeling that “Perhaps because the previous day had been, for me, so unusually eventful, or perhaps because I’d had relatively little sleep, I must say I take no great interest at all” (36).
Jacob’s immobility to discover an authentic identity in these novels leads him to struggle from the state of alienation from himself and people around him. He cannot find the meaning of the world and lives in isolation and estrangement from the rest of society. According to Sartre, there is no essential thing at the heart of us, our upsurge into the world is on the back of nothing and absurdity, it is underpinned or underwritten by nothing. Jacob is too unstable to have a role and identity for himself because he lacks the ability to fin
