Existential Anxiety and Spatial Reconstruction in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

Year 2024, Volume: 34 Issue: 1, 77 - 96, 21.06.2024

Baturay Erdal

https://doi.org/10.26650/LITERA2023-1393327

Abstract

Existentialists, while seeking meaning within the depths of human existence, examine human freedom, responsibilities, and choices. As individuals are responsible for every choice they make, a state of anxiety emerges as an intrinsic part of their existence during these choices. Meanwhile, space serves as the stage upon which human beings exist and navigate their existential journey, marked by these very responsibilities and decisions. In his novel Exit West (2017), British Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid addresses the issue of migration, which has become a global problem today, rendering the existential journeys of the protagonists Nadia and Saeed to produce a literary solution to this global issue. He invites his readers to witness not only a story of migration but also an existential journey through the magic doors he opens by using magical realism in the novel. He problematizes borders as the greatest locus of the age and facticity in the existential sense. Consequently, he attempts to demonstrate how this anxiety can be transcended in various spaces constructed using the magical realism technique. Each space reconstructed by the author promises new opportunities for the characters to make sense of their existence on the path to authenticity. Thus, the anxiety-inducing boundaries of geographical borders become an existential issue in the novel, while the imaginary line between ontological space and physical place disappears.

Keywords

Existentialism, Ontology, Anxiety, Mohsin Hamid, Space

References

• Anderson, T.C. (1993). Sartre’s two ethics: From authenticity to integral humanity. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company. google scholar
• Bachelard, G. (1994). The poetics of space: The classic look at how we experience intimate places (M. Jolas, Trans.). Boston: Beacon Press. google scholar
• Bakewell, S. (2016). >4f the existentialist cafe: Freedom, being and apricot cocktails. New York: Other Press. google scholar
• Beauvoir, S. d. (2011). The second sex (C. Borde, S. Malovany-Chevallier, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books. google scholar
• Bozkurt, N. (1984). Jean-Paul Sartre’ın insan anlayışı. Felsefe Arkivi, 0(25), 133-167. google scholar
• Casey, E. S. (1997). The fate of place: A philosophical history. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. google scholar
• Choron, J. (1963). Death and western thought. New York: Collier-Macmillan. google scholar
• Eyre, R. (2003). Preface to the Routledge classics edition. In J. P. Sartre, Being and nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology (H.E. Barnes, Trans.). London and New York: Routledge Classics. google scholar
• Fell, J. P. (1979). Heidegger and Sartre: An essay on being and place. New York: Columbia University Press. google scholar
• Foucault, M. (1986). Of other spaces. Diacritics, 16(1), 22-27. google scholar
• Fritsche, J. (1999). Historical destiny and national socialism in Heidegger’s being and time. Berkeley: University of California Press. google scholar
• Hamid, M. (2017). Exit west. New York: Riverhead Books. google scholar
• Handerek, J. (2009). The problem of authenticity and everydayness in existential philosophy. In A-T. Tymieniecka (Ed.), Phenomenology and existentialism in the twentieth century (Vol. CIII, pp. 191-200). New York, NY: Springer. google scholar
• Heidegger, M. (2001). Being and time (J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. google scholar
• Heidegger, M. (2006). Building dwelling thinking. In J. Morra & M. Smith (Eds.), Visual culture: Critical concepts in media and cultural studies (Vol. III, pp. 66-76). London and New York: Routledge. google scholar
• Kierkegaard, S. (1989). The sickness unto death (A. Hannay, Trans.). London: Penguin Books. google scholar
• Polt, R. (1999). Heidegger: An introduction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. google scholar
• Röck, T. (2017). Time for ontology? The role of ontological time in anticipation. Axiomathes, 29(1), 33-47. google scholar
• Sartre, J-P. (1963). Search for a method: The Sartrean approach to sociology and philosophy of history (H.E. Barnes, Trans.). New York: Alfred A. Knoph. google scholar
• Sartre, J-P. (2003). Being and nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology (H.E. Barnes, Trans.). London and New York: Routledge Classics. google scholar
• Sartre, J-P. (2007). Existentialism is a humanism (C. Macomber, Trans.). New Haven & London: Yale University Press. google scholar
• Şentürk, S. (2020). Postcolonial ecofeminism and the family. In Kinship reimagined: Family in Doris Lessing’s fiction (pp. 159-186). Berlin: Peter Lang. google scholar
• West, D. (1997). An introduction to continental philosophy. Cambridge: Polity Press. google scholar