Using Absurdity to Tackle Darker Themes in Fiction

The world is bad, so let’s make the fictional world even worse. Ha! But seriously: Fiction is a neutral space where real-world impacts, issues, and darker, more transgressive themes can be explored within the act of telling a thrilling story, and we can increase and elevate said exploration by implementing absurdity like a pressure gauge into familiar tropes and tales.  

Absurdity is the ever-present, intrinsically human battle for purpose and place. Albert Camus’s touchstone, The Myth of Sisyphus, details the titular Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill only to see it roll back down the moment after reaching his goal, condemning him to repeat the act for all eternity. It is a formative metaphor for theinherent absurdness of an ordered, maybe ultimately meaningless world. Absurdity can show up in fiction through a variety of ways, including but not limited toimpossible situations, mixed motives, and deeply flawed (and often doomed) characters. 

In my upcoming novella Brokeula, the main character is a vampire facing hard times. James Sugre is like any vampire trope—needs blood, is immortal, sensitive to light—but with one very specific difference: He’s broke. Use of the absurd is directly implemented into both character and the central conflict to explore the perils and brokenness of capitalism.  

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My novel, The Body Harvest, is about virus chasing, which is a real thing (look it up). What is already quite an absurd premise is made even more intense by way of dialing up the absurdity by introducing and treating viruses like people with humanistic names like Chris and Rebecca and Kevin to better explore the novel’s prevailing themes: social isolation and harassment.  

On Submission is a novel about the publishing industry, particularly its social stratification, systemic favoritism, and commodification of the craft. The absurd is directly used in the central conflict of the narrative: A rejected writer turns into a serial killer who targets his dream literary agent’s client list. The premise is so absurd, it opens for further expectation and suspension of disbelief so that real-world industry issues can be directly explored without losing the reader. 

A writer can use the absurd as a pressure gauge, where they, and in turn the prospective reader, can face horrors head on, turning the dial, increasing intensity, to better focus, and eventually conquer by the end. Let’s look at three components of a narrative and how one can use absurdity to dial up and accentuate your themes. 

Some writers deftly build out their worlds with extensive world-building; others use it like a stencil, defined just enough to service both plot and protagonist. What happens when you implement ingredients of absurdity into your narrative world? Dial it up and what do you find?  

The place becomes more temperamental and bolder. Take a look at David Fincher’s Se7en with its grim backdrop of a city on the verge of collapse. The viewer never really gets the full picture of the city, but its gasps and cries for help are always there, just out of view. A great example is a scene where Morgan Freeman’s character, Somerset, is riding in a cab, looking out the passenger window to catch a glimpse of a man splayed across the sidewalk, a group of people flocking to him, not for help, but implied to take advantage, pickpocket and strip him bare. The city comes alive as a flawed character itself, and as the absurdity of the city as a catch-all for urban anomie and depravity breathes vicious life into it.  

Take a look at Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City as another example of the setting-as-a-character. It’s yet another sprawling urban wasteland. It dons the usual cyberpunk aesthetics, but where it really flourishes are in the shadows, the literal shadows, of the city. The player encounters all kinds of substories designed to add to the mystic and the living, breathing city, and more so how it is very much alive, for now, yet on the verge of being snuffed out by capitalistic greed and severe social instability. 

Absurdity is malleable, there to be utilized like the zooming in of a camera lens, on the various elements of your setting, showing only when you want to make a point, and leaving the rest of it as its own perceived living (and dying) world. 

Adding some absurdity to your protagonist is a surefire way to cast a bold spotlight. As the point of entry for your reader, the protagonist can function as a billboard of sorts, for both conflict and consideration of your narrative’s key themes. And it doesn’t have to be so on-the-nose.  

Absurdity can extend the reader’s suspension of disbelief, allowing for a character that can, say, rebel against their own role, or become an unreliable narrator. Dialing it up even more, the character can become a full-fledged pawn, a cautionary example, of the very thing the narrative trying to establish and warn its readers. 

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is an effective example due to Amy Dunne and her multi-tiered, complex revenge plot against her husband, Nicholas. Her blurry goals willingly change at the peak of the narrative. Films like The Wrestler, Black Swan, Whiplash,and The Novice all contain protagonists that often frustratingly walk headfirst into obsession, beyond self-sacrifice for their craft or career; they become the billboard of their own malice, their own mental illness, and no matter what the viewer does to scream out and try to get them to be real, wake up, it’s pointless, and yet we all are there, along for the ride, embracing the stressful, teeth grinding exploration of deeply personal psychological themes. 

I can’t really discuss absurdity in plot without citing classics like Waiting for Godotand Camus’s The Stranger. Two characters wait for another to arrive, despite day after day, that character never arrives. Ingenious and highly absurd, the dial is turned up to eleven, setting up the plot itself to be freed from any real need for movement. There is suddenly so much space for discussion and exploration of the narrative’s key themes. In fact, the plot becomes the go-to element that signals to the reader to get ready, suspend disbelief, we’re going off the deep end. There’s really nothing better than pitching the extent of what might unfold than in the context of the narrative’s central conflict. 

In The Stranger, the protagonist faces death and eventual murder at face-value. The plot itself is simple, every main point fully exposed, leaving it all open to examine the ramifications and Camus’s tenets of absurdism. As the plot is often the heartbeat of a narrative, dialing up the absurdity of the premise can increase the pulse, allowing for higher concept examination through the various happenstance and “non” plot moments within the narrative. The reader knows what will unfold, and yet you cannot stop reading, cannot look away, while Camus uses the simple plot like a conductor, letting the intrinsically woven themes to each get their own solo moment to sing. 

Ultimately, the beauty of dialing absurdity to a drastic height, or a drastic low, maximizing the extreme, is that it cuts through all the lead in and the buildup; it forces both reader and writer to get to it quickly. Moreover, it offers propulsion for the plot, and a chance of a character to really stand out in all their flawed and human glory. Get to what you’re trying to show, trying to tell, trying to say. We’re all dying, so let’s get to the next plot point; let’s point directly to what’s being discussed. In doing so, absurdity can act like a bullhorn in a riotous crowd.  

When it’s wild, we all look.