“Lives of Absurds: A Comparative Study of Social Rejection in The Outsider and The Metamorphosis ”

Abstract

This thesis analyses social rejection and absurdity in two of the world’s renowned literary texts: Albert Camus’s The Outsider and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. It is about studying how societal norms, socialization, and expectation dictate individual alienation, which goes to an extremity of existential pain. Meursault and Gregor Samsa both protagonists are socially excluded and alienated yet the type, results and the philosophical significance of their exclusion vary significantly. In The Outsider, Meursault’s purposeful indifference to the social world and Gregor’s involuntary metamorphosis in The Metamorphosis demonstrate how rejection (or failure) to adhere to social norms identifies them as “absurd”. Hence, in them, the society finds it easy to do away with. Through a comparative literary reading informed by Camus’s absurd philosophy and Kafka’s modernist depiction of alienation, this study analyzes how the spatial dynamics of the juridical and the domestic construct illusionary order over personal liberty, taking shape as instruments of social control, ethical surveillance and material commodification rather than systems of social justice and mechanisms for safeguarding social wellbeing. It also underscores the factor of language and miscommunication – which becomes the focal point in alienation, as silence, misinterpretation, emotional separation reveals the boundaries of social understanding.