"ECHOES OF THE VOID: EXISTENTIAL ALIENATION IN FICTION"

Abstract

Existential alienation is also one of the most significant and unyielding issues in the contemporary and modern fiction. The idea of alienation is rooted in philosophical questions that were put forth by thinkers like Srenner Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus and that the individual becomes estranged by the society, self, communication and metaphysical meaning. The paper discusses the ways of how existential alienation is expressed in fiction with fragmented narrative forms, unreliable consciousness, city allocation, and deserted landscapes of emptiness. Through the analysis of some of the global and postcolonial fiction writings, the paper is based on the premise that existential alienation in fiction is not enough to present uniformity of despondency but is rather a critical paradigm of aesthetics used to highlight the anxiety of culture, identities crisis and degradation of stable realities in late modernity. The paper also argues that modern storylines convert alienation into a place of opposing or struggle, self-naturalization and reinvention of a story. A close textual study and theoretical discussions allow defining existential alienation as a psychological state as well as a variant of narration that redefines the literary imagination in the modern world.