The Existential Egos in Duong Nghiem Mau’s Prose

Abstract

Taking its shape in the 1920s of the twentieth century, existentialism has pervaded into a wide range of world literatures. In Southern Vietnam (1955 – 1975), the reception of existentialism theories underwent no crack and proved to be compatible with the social context full of volatility. Existentialism is a “humanitarian theory” (J.P.Sartre). Existentialism theories have permeated the writers’ consciousness and works in terms of their views of the human fate in the period when "God is dead”. Duong Nghiem Mau was a pioneer writer in receiving and expressing existential themes in his works, paving the way for the existential literature of Southern Vietnam. His works reflected various social aspects of life in Southern Vietnam, featuring the voice of a lost generation. The return of Duong Nghiem Mau's fiction at the beginning of the twentieth-first century emerged as a piece of evidence for the durability of existentialism and its pervasiveness in the global literature.