Essay Questions

Explore the concept of absurdism in Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair.

In The Eyre Affair, Fforde explores the fictional section of Absurd explicitly. Being “two parts fantasy, two parts absurdity, and one part mystery” in the arguments of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, absurdism is brought into light in the novel through characters who embody certain aspects in the area of absurd. Thursday Next, for instance, lives a life that is devoid of truth and is rather quite meaningless until she later catches the thief of the manuscript, twists the book, and manages to win her love interest. Thursday then becomes quite amazed at her own life after that as she feels that she has found that which she had left in the Crimea.

Additionally, the book explores the concept of time travel, an idea that is in the indulgence of the absurdist point of view. This aspect is mainly explored when the Colonel (Colonel Next) is given the ability to travel back in time and change certain events that had happened in the past that render the events in the present pointless, hollow and worthless. As a result of this, the other characters in the novel cannot validate the truthfulness of the life they are living as the Chronoguard agents have the ability to travel back in time and change the truth or any other event. This becomes clear in Thursdays Life when her father travels into the past and plants bananas, a situation that changes her view of what a banana is.

Explore, using illustrations from The Eyre Affair, how the novel-writer uses religion to advance the theme of Absurdism.

Jasper Fforde uses the theme of religion to advance his ideology and concept of absurdity in The Eyre Affair. In the novel, there is only one religion, which is defined as the Global Standard Deity or the GSD. Absurdism mainly presents itself in the way that Thursday Next’s brother responds to the question of whether the religion which he had subscribed to allowed profanities such as “fat arse,” her brother responds that the religion sometimes did allow verbal jibes and sometimes it did not: “Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t...That’s the beauty of the Global Standard Deity---it’s whatever you want it to be” (The Eyre Affair, 196). This is absurdist since it’s a fruitless shot at a compromise that denotes the demise of religious conviction rather than a pleasant-sounding ‘watering-down.’