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“The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”

Realism has never been comfortable with ideas. It could not be otherwise: realism is premised on the idea that ideas have no autonomous existence, can exist only in things. So when it needs to debate ideas, as here, realism is driven to invent situations - walks in the countryside, conversations - in which characters give voice to contending ideas and thereby in a certain sense embody them.

“Is there a satisfaction in the effort of remembering that provides its own nourishment, and is what recollects less important than the act of remembering? That is another question that will remain unanswered: I feel as though I am made of nothing else” (p. 6).