Nihilism

MOVIE CHOSEN: American Beauty American Beauty, a movie directed by Sam Mendes is a movie about taking a break from our ordinary day to day lives and becoming aware of the beauty around us while redefining what ‘beauty’ means to different people. It presents a satirical critique on the images of ‘beauty’ and ‘success’ portrayed by media and society which we internalize and strive to achieve leading to feelings of insecurity and confusion. By following a postmodernist approach, the director…

the trust factor with its lies. In “The Domestic Surveillance Lie,” Eddlem tells how the government misrepresented the issues about the collection and misuse of personal data (Eddlem). The recurring denial and acknowledgment of the truth creates nihilism and doubt among citizens. If the government keeps trying to hide things, suspicion will arise in the state-citizen relationship. The government must make a conscious change to prevent themselves from getting carried away with the power and…

addresses specific charges against existential thought, defends existentialism, and situates his own ethics of existential thought among other thinkers. Sartre begins addressing the charge that existential thought is in the same ethical realm as nihilism, meaning that if there is no transcendent meaning or objective standard then there is no inherent meaning in the world and, in result, that nothing matters. Sartre explains this nihilistic view of existentialism creates a “desperate quietism”…

Hiroshima by John Hersey is a historical nonfiction book that tells the stories of six survivors of the devastating nuclear bomb dropped on Japan on August 6th, 1945. Each character feels the effects of the bomb directly and has to deal with the changes in their formerly ordinary lives, along with the misery and hysteria, and the mysterious radiation sickness that follows the devastating nuclear explosion. This book was mostly written to dispel derogatory views of the Japanese in America during…

There is an ongoing fight in life. It is a fight that requires intentional thought and effort. It is a fight choosing between what is truly important in life versus what people perceive as important. In the novel, The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway, there is a fight between a fish and a fisherman. In fiction, many authors manipulate ideas or perspectives specifically so that readers only know what they want them to know. In Hemingway’s case, he leaves ideas very open ended, which in…

stories in parallel to “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, only one truly stood out to me as directly related in theme, portrayal, and literary style. This has to be “The Last Day of the World” by Ray Bradbury. Both stories have deep rooted themes around nihilism and death, but are substantially distinct in their portrayal of these ideas. The premise is the same as the rest of the short stories; it is the end of the world, how will people react, adapt, cooperate, fight... McCarthy focuses his story…

Guilt and Innocence in The Stranger “Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: ‘Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.’ That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.” (Camus 3) The perplexing tale of Meursault, an emotionally detached and seemingly amoral young man living in Algiers, stands notoriously as the introduction to “the absurd.” Albert Camus coined this school of thought, using The Stranger as a mechanism for expressing…

was in college, I remember fearing that the dreary grind of adulthood would feature infinitely more existential dread than frat parties had, but the opposite has been true for me. I 'm much less likely to feel that gnawing fear of aimlessness and nihilism than I used to be and that 's partly because education gave me good job opportunities, but it 's mostly because education gave me perspective and context.” This was the provocative saying and illuminating thought of John Green in his book: Is…

Raskolnikov: A Freudian Psychoanalysis of the “Extraordinary Man” Raskolnikov is the type of character that Freud would have obsessed over: a man with a perceived sense of mental stability but with a realm of repressed desires — all the more reason to explore the unconscious, the uncharted realms of the human psyche. Contrary to Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, the dreams in Dostoevsky’s novel function as something beyond the characterization of archetypes common to multiple…

Satirical entertainment has continually evolved. Mostly being social commentary placed in the framework of humor that actively ridicules and exposes the weaknesses in humans, satire has adapted to the dynamic, ever changing vices that is human nature. Contemporary satire has evolved, displaying itself in a multitude of outlets. With vast technological advances, contemporary satire is no longer only present in books, and it no longer is proved as ineffective. Contemporary satire has inserted…