This undergraduate thesis investigates the theme of general human existential despair and its consequences in four chosen prominent novels from the bibliography of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.; in order to achieve so, the thesis relies predominantly on Albert Camus, the most distinguished theoretician of the absurd. It aims to discover the meeting points between how Camus as a philosopher treats the absurd as a starting point and how Vonnegut portrays it via prose. In the treatment of the former, the thesis does not always rely merely on the substantive philosophical-theoretical paradigm, but also examines it from a literary-theoretical perspective. This thesis also strives to establish a distinction between the principals of human life which both authors infer from the feeling, and from the recognition of the absurd.
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