Banding together to weather the lonely nihilistic storms in Never Let Me Go and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

• Main Author: Lum, Shu Wei.
• Other Authors: Andrew Corey Yerkes
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Literature::English
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/44238
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The characters in Never Let Me Go and The Unbearable Lightness of Being experience much freedom and solitude from their lonely existence in a nihilistic universe. Their respective existential anxieties are assuaged through interpersonal relationships, and the intersubjective interactions between these characters allow them to obtain meaning in their lives. This essay will explore how the characters from the respective novels seek meaning in their lives through conscious choices and actions in order to develop their interpersonal relationships with others and assuage the loneliness in a nihilistic universe. The depth and extent of meaning that these characters obtain from their respective relationships will be explained in a structurally progressive analysis, in which the characters find meaning from their interpersonal relationships between their significant other(s), their relationship between their families and finally their relationship between their community and society. As existentialism is a “person-centred philosophy”, the essay’s structure mirrors the progression of finding meaning in one’s life from various relationships, as meaning is often first attained from the more private type of relationships to the more public type of relationships. Furthermore, it would also be reflective of how the search for meaning is a simultaneously introspective and external process, which results in an internal epiphany acting itself out externally in the ways one behaves in the larger sense of their community and universe.