Top 10 Existential Novels

FIGHT CLUB [1996] Chuck Palahniuk Image

"It's easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die. On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero."

JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT [1932] Louis-Ferdinand Celine Image

"The biggest defeat in every department of life is to forget, especially the things that have done you in, and to die without realizing how far people can go in the way of crumminess. When the grave lies open before us, let's not try to be witty, but on the other hand, let's not forget, but make it our business to record the worst of the human viciousness we've seen without changing one word. When that's done, we can curl up our toes and sink into the pit. That's work enough for a lifetime."

MAN'S FATE [1932] Andre Malraux Image

"The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our own nothingness."

STEPPENWOLF [1928] Hermann Hesse Image

"I believe that the struggle against death, the unconditional and self-willed determination to live, is the motive power behind the lives and activities of all outstanding men."

THE WOMAN IN THE DUNES [1962] Kobo Abe Image

"Are you shoveling to survive, or surviving to shovel?"

NAUSEA [1938] Jean-Paul Sartre Image

"I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating."

THE TRIAL [1925] Franz Kafka Image

"Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live. Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the High Court he had never reached? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers. But the hands of one of the men closed round his throat, just as the other drove the knife deep into his heart and turned it twice."

INVISIBLE MAN [1952] Ralph Ellison Image

"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie extoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me."

NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND [1864] Fyodor Dostoevsky Image

"But yet I am firmly persuaded that a great deal of consciousness, every sort of consciousness, in fact, is a disease."

THE STRANGER [1942] Albert Camus Image

"Throughout the whole absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living. What did other people's deaths or a mother's love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we're all elected by the same fate . . ."

Top 10 Most Existential Plays

User Comments - Add a Comment

Milosimpatica - 2008-02-12 21:48:46
Don't know if this is an existential novel, but Auster's The Locked Room: In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose.

86me - 2008-02-12 23:04:10
great list. good to see the stranger.

Anonymous - 2008-02-13 01:08:46
What about Waiting for Godot? Great list though.

joey - 2008-02-17 22:57:00
Waiting for Godot is a play.

Anonymous - 2008-02-28 07:32:03
the stranger is one of my favorite books. great list.

rich - 2008-03-13 00:47:17
i took an existentialism in film and literature course and my favorite book was Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov. That is some deeply interesting stuff

Anonymous - 2008-03-17 19:50:06
what about hickhikers guide to the galaxy? they can be funny

Anonymous - 2008-03-23 00:22:13
camus==absurdist absurdist=/=existentialist

Anonymous - 2008-03-25 12:43:53
Well thats what Camus would say

izzy. - 2008-04-26 11:18:53
Spontaneously picked up Stomp! by Nicholas van Pelt in a used bookstore. Surprisingly gripping novel. Very up-front that its protagonist is an existentialist and has seen how his entire life has been shaped by the events of a single season in his teen years. But I think it qualifies despite its openness of message.

Ben - 2008-10-23 23:42:46

Kazuo Ishiguro - The Unconsoled. I read it again recently and it blows my mind every time. Truely an amazing experiance.

Dwayne - 2008-11-11 22:43:40

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. Should get a mention.

Disco - 2009-01-18 18:06:28

http://www.stumbleupon.com/toolbar/#url=http%2525253A//www.alternativereel.com/includes/top-ten/display_review.php%2525253Fid%2525253D00079

Dale M - 2009-02-13 13:43:25

Great list. Might also consider The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Walker Percy's The Moviegoer (heavily influenced by Kierkagaard), and the works of Richard Yates.

Jani - 2009-03-14 14:23:11

You totally forgot American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis A dark and disturbing yet intense study of human emotion(lessness)

Blake - 2009-04-29 01:09:17

Honorable mention Stephen King's - The Long Walk, most terrifying book ive ever read.

ShaKha - 2009-05-01 22:26:25

This is a great list and the Stranger is a fantastic book (my favourite book), but Camus was not an existentialist. He was an absurdist.

ben Bradshaw - 2009-05-16 21:04:19

there was a DVD made of some (or all) of beckett's plays, including waiting for godot

greg - 2009-06-08 20:28:01

The stranger is a great book, it has made a huge impact on my life.

AKW - 2009-06-15 16:40:14

"Nausea" should be higher than five I think. The book is not so much a novel as much as it is an Exitentialist handbook, in which it outlines the central components of the philosophy.

Anonymous - 2009-06-23 12:54:28

regarding the absurd: it is a key element of the construct which has ultimately come to be regarded as existential thought. it's not necessary to be an existential-ist, per se, to have contributed to the foundations of the philosophy. Simone de Beauvoir deserves a spot on the list. "All Men are Mortal", maybe?

Unamuno - 2009-07-24 13:18:03

Invisible Man is the furthest thing from an Existential Novel.

the great gagu - 2009-07-30 11:28:02

"I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating." I suppose that's a clever way of saying "everything shits me". Cheer up emo kids :)

Umer - 2009-08-08 06:31:53

Nausea must have been at number 1 or 2. its far greater than "the trial" or "the invisible man". though i do place "the stranger" and "notes from underground" in the top 3 list but i think the third in this list must have been "nausea"

Dakk - 2009-10-01 19:02:58

Great list. My favorite quotations. Also good to see The Stranger as #1.