Existential Nihilism In Toni Morrison's Alone With Everybody

Implying that there is no hope for existence, the speaker of “Alone with Everybody” embraces existential nihilism with his declaration of impossibility through the use of absolute diction and metaphors epistrophe, and asyndeton. Morosely, the speaker uses absolute diction coupled with the bleak metaphor, “flesh,” to describe the human experience, lamenting that, “nobody finds the one… flesh covers the bone and the flesh searches for more than flesh” (Bukowski). Employing the use of the metaphor, “flesh,” the speaker overly simplifies the human experience and mind, by reminding his audience that people are made of “flesh” and “bone,” but do not find further meaning. It is through this declaration of impossibility that the speaker justifies the
Coupled with the use of absolute diction, the use of epistrophe in the last two stanzas repetition of places such as “city dumps,” “junkyards,” “madhouses,” “hospitals,” and “graveyards” which are all places that the speaker associates with a lack of hope, “fill[ing],” but “nothing else fills” (Bukowski). By lamenting that people search for something greater than themselves but only hopeless places fill, the speaker once again enables himself to take the burden of choice off of his shoulders and onto that of fate and society. It is this very choice to stop searching for meaning, that overwhelms both the speaker of “Alone with Everybody” and Shadrack from Toni Morrison’s novel, Sula. Both of them, make the choice to dwell in their misery and circumstance instead of making the active choice to help themselves. In short, both Shadrack and the speaker of “Alone with Everybody” choose to dwell in their unhappiness and to live in a world in which they both feel alone with everybody, when all they have to do it to ask for help instead of declaring life meaningless or making a day devoted to