Preview of The Ginger Man Summary:

Although The Ginger Man ultimately subverts its intention to satirize bourgeois values and aspirations, it creates a compelling variation on the absurdist literary tradition. Dangerfield is literally obsessed with the idea of his own and everyone else's death, and as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre suggest in their differing existentialist philosophies, the idea of one's own death renders existence absurd. This perception in turn can lead to despair, or to anarchic individualism. In Dangerfield's case, the result of his discovery that the universe is random and life has no purpose is his total selfabsorption, as well as a compete indifference to the feelings and needs of others. Dangerfield's waiting for his father's death, so that he may take his "rightful" place as decider of how the family fortune should be spent remotely resembles the attitude of Camus's character Mersault, who is convicted technically for killing an Arab, although...