Individualism and Escape: Hunger, The Metamorphosis, and The Stranger Anonymous 12th Grade

Choice is inescapable and inevitable to all who exist or have ever existed. When meeting a fork in the road, a decision is always made, even if no action is taken. Utterly paradoxical, even the act of no decision at all is stepping in one direction of a choice, always making a statement. It is around this ideology of constant choice that the philosophical theory of existentialism exists. It declares that each individual lives in the universe as a being of free-will, one that is capable of his own decision-making and actions. And that it is through these self-determined choices and actions that each individual distinguishes himself from every other member of the population while simultaneously defining himself. The existentialist theme presents itself in three divergent ways in the following works: Hunger, The Metamorphosis, and The Stranger. In each of these compositions, the protagonist is physically and mentally alienated from society, possesses a desire for something never obtained, and dies surrounded by a void that continues past their deaths and applies to others.

In Hunger, Bobby Sands experiences mental and physical alienation from his surroundings due to his hunger strike and subsequent placement in the hospital ward....