DRAMATIC HERO AS A CAPTIVE OF EXISTENTIAL NIHILISM

Year 2016, Volume: 1 Issue: 1, 171 - 186, 01.01.2016

Maja D. Stojkovıć

Abstract

The main goal of this paper using V.M. Jovanović's first drama Tako reče Zaratustra Thus Spoke Zarathustra as an example is to depict the hero of a bourgeois drama, on the one hand, and determine the philosophical systems that conditioned his appearance which, interactively, was conditioned in the case of later philosophical movements by the reality whose direct product and epitome is just such a hero, on the other hand. It will later be shown that the struggle between individual and society, in the changed relationship between plural and singular individuals as the representatives of a large number of disempowered people versus few possessors of justice belonging to the privileged class as an epitome of the imposed general laws , was transferred onto the inner plane as a conflict over the choice between mere existence and authentic Sartrerian existence . Under conditions of inequality and oppression, the dramatic hero, an epitome of the man of that period, becomes powerless and insecure as a fighter for real existence. Thus, in this struggle of opposites Moore'e idea of real versus actual man, understood slightly differently in Nietzsche's philosphy – through the relationship between the superman and his opponent a weak-willed man – re-emerges and is transposed into the Serbian drama literature of the early 20th century in a distinctive way. The search for oneself and meaning assumes the contours of eternal wandering because utopia can only be found within characters, but looking into the essence requires strength which they evidently lack. Such a kind of disregard for contradictions within oneself requires spirituality that emanates from the core of humanness and whose basic aspiration is the rejection of any hesitancy and the achievement of integrity. In view of the fact that the integrity so understood is depicted in Jovanović’s play from the viewpoint of weak-willed people, it also includes the need for union or, to be more exact, the union of incompatibles – female and male principles, as well as discourses. However, the structure of these characters’ inner pole is conditioned by existential insecurity. At the same time, such a form of insecurity is also the cause of ethical relativism that is further transformed into modernist nihilism

Keywords

dramatic hero, bourgeois drama, superman, existential nihilism, homelessness, apathy, Nietzsche

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