Congratulations to
@The Judge on a resounding victory. It was number one for me as soon as I read it.
As for my own story, thanks to
@Christine Wheelwright for the honorable mention,
@Elckerlyc and
@Phyrebrat for the shortlistings, Her Honor for the just-missed-the-shortlist, and
@chrispenycate for the stealth vote.
And I did promise something of an explanation, so here goes.
Oh, and I guess a trigger warning for a philosophical mention of unaliving yourself.
So, I was toying with an idea of a negotiation between two parties regarding the purchase of machines to replace a bioengineered caste of labourers (unbeknownst to the purchaser, both the seller and the machines were AIs), and I thought to myself, you know what, hell with it, I never win these things anyways, I'm going to try to write a piece of absurdist fiction despite the fact I feel I've barely dipped my toe into the whole of existentialist/absurdist thought (I have a lot more reading to do on the subject).
From Wikipedia; "Absurdist fiction is a genre of novels, plays, poems, films, or other media that focuses on the experiences of characters in situations where they cannot find any inherent purpose in life, most often represented by ultimately meaningless actions and events that call into question the certainty of existential concepts such as truth or value." Also, "A great deal of absurdist fiction may be humorous or
irrational in nature" (emphasis mine).
Absurdism, as I understand it, is a philosophy closely related to existentialism but focused on the conflict between human's innate desire/need for meaning and the unrelenting silence of the world/universe in response to that quest for meaning. Neither is absurd on its own, but the absurd arises from the contradiction between the two.
The title of my story, "One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy," is ripped straight from
The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, where he argues that suicide is not a reasonable or logical response to the realization of the absurd and the meaningless of life, and holds up Sisyphus as an absurd hero representing realization and acceptance of the absurd, as well as the eternal struggle in living an absurd life.
The part of my story where the protagonist suddenly becomes
aware of their arm is an attempt to describe something I've personally experienced several times over the years, which can perhaps be described as a sudden, inexplicable, complete awareness of the phenomena of one's own existence in the world. The closest analogue I've read is probably the bouts of "nausea" experienced by the protagonist of Jean-Paul Sartre's
Nausea. Let me try to explain it.
Imagine you're driving a car, and you come to a fork in the road, and the person in the seat beside you says to turn left. So you turn left, the car goes left, easy peasy.
Now imagine it's an alien being in the driver's seat, intelligent, inquisitive, but who came to Earth wholly ignorant of our technology and has been incessantly asking how and why things work. When told to turn left, the alien thinks, okay, I use my upper appendages to turn the steering wheel counterclockwise and this engages a mechanism (assisted by the power steering) which angles the front wheels to the left and by virtue of the friction between the rubber and the asphalt of the road the body of the vehicle is pulled to the left and while doing so I maintain pressure on the accelerator pedal with my lower appendage which manages the flow of fuel into the engine and . . . etc etc ad nauseam.
Now imagine the driver is your mind/consciousness, the car is your body, and you are suddenly, inexplicably, thrust from the former mindset into the latter. That's kind of what I'm driving at (no pun intended).
In the story, this realization of the self is furthered when the protagonist is cast into nothingness by the surreal nature of the Man in the Suit; left, quite literally, alone with their thoughts, they come to the realization proposed by René Descartes; Cogito, ergo sum - I think, therefore I am.
Having had this visceral reinforcement of their own existence, first in body, then in mind, the protagonist is left with this notion of the primacy of their existence in facing the absurd; "existence precedes essence" is a maxim espoused by a number of existentialist philosophers and applies here. Camus wrote in
The Myth of Sisyphus: "Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion." The freedom here is in the protagonist's ability to choose how they confront the absurd (
the choice).
There is a quote falsely attributed to Camus that reads: "Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?" The nihilist, I think, being concerned solely with the meaningless of the world would see no distinction between the two choices, where the absurdist acknowledges the possibility of the individual finding subjective meaning in their life (though decidedly less optimistic about that drive to find or create meaning than broader existentialism). The protagonist of my story, having come through the reverie of their own existence and finding themself back in the world, faced with the absurd, is offered this metaphorical cup of coffee but the result of their freedom and their choice is left ambiguous (honestly I can't remember if this was intentional or if I just ran out of words!). Regardless of their choice, it is clear the dirty laundry is just going to keep coming.
Looking back at it now, I tried to cram a lot into 300 words. I also may have fallen into a trap of trying to express something I can't be certain I quite yet fully understand; I hope anyone more well-read on the subject than I can forgive any errors in understanding or incomplete logic. I'm still a neophyte in this, and admittedly while something about existentialist/absurdist thought draws me in, I have had difficulty thus far reconciling what I've read and learned with my own beliefs about why life is worth living.
Also, I harbor a very strong dislike for doing laundry.
