John Irving's Existentialist Heroes

The aim of the analysis at hand is to refer to existentialist philosophy as a framework through which it becomes possible to successfully attempt a breakdown of Irving's protagonists' lives in an absurd world and demonstrate that the narrative and the characters follow an existentialist pattern. By doing so the analysis aims to demonstrate that most of John Irving's protagonists can be seen as existentialist heroes per se and that their behavior and their actions could subsequently be referred to as existentialist exploits.