the central concerns of existential thought is that, in the absence of divine or biolog- ical rules, people must be responsible for their own actions. This is the price of freedom—with no rules from God or psychological traumas to excuse what one does, the responsibility for each action falls on the individual. Hemingway’s characters offer a good example of this. They follow rules of behavior that they establish for themselves, often referred to as the “Hemingway code.” While other writers might present characters that are victims of fate, the characters in Hemingway’s books and other existential literature are responsible for their own fate. Other examples of this are Sartre’s playDirty Hands, which shows its protagonist accepting guilt for murdering an obviously dangerous opponent during wartime, and Beauvoir’s The Blood of Others, in which a student who is shaken by the inadvertent death of a colleague decides that he must still participate in violent radical political activity.

The presumption of innocence that comes from absolute freedom is inverted in the works of Franz Kafka, most notably in his novel The Trial. Instead of being an existential hero who chooses to make himself guilty, Joseph K. is proclaimed guilty by a dense and illogical legal system, for reasons that he cannot understand. Rather than focusing attention on the free individual, Kafka shows the repressive social order that makes it difficult for the individual to realize that he is, in fact, free to decide his own fate. By making the bureaucracy that condemns Joseph K. such an impersonal and irrational thing, Kafka shows how transparent it is. In this novel, the legal system is frightening, but it is not in control of the individual. The superficial charge of guilt helps readers see how shallow it is to believe in any universal system of guilt or innocence.

Identity and Self Existentialism, like any philosophical movement, is a search for the right way to understand human identity. Other systems might conceive of identity in relation to something, such as when psychologists find the roots of identity in past experiences or in the effects of chemical balances in the brain, or when Romanticism frames identity in terms of humanity’s relationship to nature. In Existentialism, however, there is no point of reference for human identity. A person’s identity does not exist in anything except that person’s actions. As Sartre explained it, existence precedes essence— there are no rules governing a person’s essential identity until after that person exists.

French Existentialism crossed over to America in the early 1950s, at a time that the Civil Rights movement was just beginning to give a voice and identity to black Americans. The two were a natural fit. Blacks who had been treated in American society in accordance with the color of their skin were open to the existential concept that a person creates his or her own identity. One of the preeminent American novelists of the twentieth century, Ralph Ellison, explored existential themes as they applied to the race issue in his 1952 novel Invisible Man, about a black man’s struggle for selfidentity against society’s narrow definitions of him.

Alienation Alienation was considered by many intellectuals throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to increasingly be the condition of civilized humans. It is the feeling of isolation, of not belonging, of standing alone. Since the advent of the Industrial Age, social philosophers like Karl Marx have shown how people are alienated from the work that they do, with the connection severed by the economic system. Psychologists have shown alienation as a rift between the conscious and unconscious aspects of self. Theologians have shown humanity as becoming increasingly alienated from reality as the importance of God has diminished.

Existentialism can be seen as a response to the social phenomenon of alienation. As the feeling of being left out of society grew, so did the existentialist’s philosophy that it is natural to be separate from society, because the idea of belonging to society was an illusion all along. It is no coincidence that one of the most prominent novels of the French existentialist movement was Albert Camus’s The Stranger, which, as its title implies, highlights the idea that its protagonist is outside of the bounds of social order, alienated even from those closest to him. In novels such as The Deer Park in 1955, Norman Mailer applied the concept of Existentialism to the particular form of alienation that was felt in postwar America, with fear of the atomic bomb and of Communism. Mailer devised the concept of the “hipster,” who reacts to everything with his own wry sense of irony. In fact, the term “existential hero” came to be used to describe characters in books and movies who acted alone, who had no ties to anyone, and who followed the rules of behavior set down by their own understanding of the world.