What is reality? And who are we, the people populating it? Both fiction and philosophy are engaged in unraveling this questions, and their answers uncover the absurd nature of our existence, writes Joanna Kavenna. 

Albert Camus wrote: 'A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.’ As soon as you create a character you ask philosophical questions about the nature of the self; as soon as you create a world you ask philosophical questions about the nature of reality.

In an absurdist novel, as in an absurdist philosophical argument, the universe is fundamentally meaningless and any attempt to find a sane and coherent interpretation of events is doomed by the insane and incoherent nature of reality.

In a sense, all fiction is quite absurd, because it is concerned with the inner lives of unreal people. Then again, reality can seem quite absurd as well, because we are told there are rules and indelible facts and then - as we’ve recently seen - everything abruptly changes.

Indeed these sudden, at times painful shifts of reality, are the fundamental concern of the absurdist novel. But philosophy, too, is preoccupied with the question of reality - how we might distinguish reality from unreality, and who ‘we’ are anyway when ‘we’ seek to do this.

As soon as you create a character you ask philosophical questions about the nature of the self; as soon as you create a world you ask philosophical questions about the nature of reality.