UNDERSTANDING THE ABSURD UNDER THE SHADOW OF LATE CAPITALISM: Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut

This essay examines the absurd-particularly as defined and articulated by Albert Camus in Le Myth de Sisyphe-in the work of a few prominent so-called postmodern American authors. I argue that the work of these writers features a salient aspect of the absurdity at the heart of life in the age of the postmodern and that is an absurdity that is borne out of the period’s relationship to late capitalism, whose emergence in American culture began in what Marianne DeKoven calls the “long 1960s” (the late 1950s to the early 1970s). It focuses on the prescient work of science fiction author Philip K. Dick and especially his troubled “drug” novel, A Scanner Darkly, which really brings to the fore Dick’s career long interest in the absurdity of late capitalism. In the second half of the essay, I discuss the important contributions of Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut to living and surviving absurdly in the late capitalistic age of the postmodern.