Title

El Absurdo y la Condicion Humana en la Narrativa de Virgilio Pinera

Date of Award

1982

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics

Advisor(s)

Myron I. Lichtblau

Keywords

The Absurd, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Ionesco, Beckett, Cuba

Subject Categories

Latin American Literature

Abstract

The narrative of Virgilio Pinera collects the thought and aesthetic influence comprised in the literature of the absurd which is specially present in drama. Here we will examine ideological and aesthetic sources from Sartre and Albert Camus to the group of dramatists of the absurd, which includes Ionesco, Beckett, and Adamov, as well as the significant contribution of Kafkian absurd in contemporary narrative.

These influences are a part of Pinera's absurdist vision, where the absurd always results from the presence of irrationality in natural, everyday order. Each event announced as perfectly logical one is always reduced to its possible denial, to its definite meeting with the absurd. Hence, the absurd is not simply a formal procedure such as the lack of coherence in language, practiced in theatre, but more likely a definition of the universe and its relationship with humanity.

Virgilio Pinera, like Sabato, Cortazar, and other Latin American writers, finds in absurdist or existencialist aesthetics the precise mechanism for denouncing the lack of rationality of a world full of both wealth and misery, of both great spirituality and a lack of morality. Pinera's short stories and novels make up a homogenous view of a world marked by despair as a result of a fragile human condition and limited by its somatic elements, which prevent it from fully understanding its existence.

The main conclusion is that for Pinera absurdist aesthetics are the most effective instrument for expressing Cuba's historical, social and political reality, which also transcends the particular problem in order to project a reality of a more universal scope.

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