Living or Being Lived - Literary Illustrations of Early Modernist Existentialist Turmoil

Existentialism sees man in a permanent activity of self defining. Man cannot but act. While acting, he defies time, the flow of existence, and gives meaning to his life, living instead of being lived. But getting from the state of existing to that of actually living is not as easy as exposing the concept. Traps of life, deceiving paths, swindling facts are met at every step. Characters as those portrayed by Jean Paul Sartre, André Gide, Mircea Eliade and other modern writers concerned with how man relates to the others, to the surrounding social environment, to his own place in history and in the world, render some of the psychological aspects that constitute the human being’s correlation with the outer world. The inner response to the outer stimuli, the way of perceiving, interpreting the world and the manner of trying to direct this environment, to impose ourselves and become the decision makers in our destinies are masterly illustrated in the literary works of these modern writers. The apparent freedom to choose, the illusive reality, the need to fight, to defeat commonplace and go beyond the mundane by taking a sort of action, from the deeply desperate unexplainable deeds, to the conscious acts of will that could be historically remarkable, are to the same degree attempts to make time surrender, to draw some achievements that would give a meaning to life.

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