ABSTRACT
The success of Martin Esslin’s book has associated Absurdity and Drama in the popular mind to the exclusion of prose fiction, and the first important works Nausea and The Outsider–not to mention Andre Malraux, Franz Kafka, and Feodor Dostoevsky–were novels. Thus, although no comprehensive study of the field of prose fiction and criticism can be made, some illustration is useful. R. W. B. Lewis’s study of novelists The Picaresque Saint was published in 1960; in it he looks at a group of European and American novelists chosen as prophets or ‘representative’ men. Lewis’s choice of novelists is international: Malraux and Albert Camus are French, Faulkner American, and Greene English. Ihab Hassan suggests that a literate Martian looking at the bookshelves full of contemporary novels would conclude that the planet Earth was on the way to self-destruction, and that the world is such that man lives under the constant threat of death, and can only respond by being rebel or victim.
