Perelman rediscovered the values aspect of epideictic: It “strengthens the disposition toward action by increasing adherence to the values it lauds.” Burke's entelechy claims that humans unconsciously act upon themselves in accordance with the implicit value systems of the entelechies with which they identify. The two are here merged in a genre study of the gospels.

EXISTENTIALIST LITERATURE is often referred to as a function of absurdity, alienation and nihilistic despair since the works of this genre are inhabited by unsavory protagonists and gloomy subject matter. The idea of existential dread often dominates our understanding of existentialism, and this is not only unfortunate, but terribly flawed. It is as if the decision to pick up and leaf through any novel by Franz Kafka or Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea , Albert Camus’ The Stranger or Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting For Godot , is not just an exercise in leisurely entertainment, but a statement about how one is feeling—and that feeling might be summed up, in the popular imagination, as meaninglessness. Viewed through a Burkean lens, however, one may re-consider existentialist literature as rhetorical acts that provoke the ontological difficulties with which persons negotiate their social environment equipped with only the resources of symbolic action. Instead of viewing this genre as advancing the desolate egoism of individual consciousnesses, applying the Burkean Parlor described in The Philosophy of Literary Form and Burke’s notion of the representative anecdote re-figure these works of fiction as animating a particular orientation and worldview—the point of which is to create a vocabulary that reflects, selects and deflects reality ( Grammar of Motives 59). Burke’s method of literary analysis suggests that literature should be organized “with reference to strategies ” in “active categories” ( Philosophy 303). By adopting Burke’s methodology to analyze existentialist literature, I’d like to move away from the popular reception of the genre and reveal its preoccupation with the ontological struggle of communication which fits squarely within Burke’s dramatistic notion of symbolic action. These works of fiction should not be evaluated aesthetically but as rhetorical acts whose purpose is to intensify the exigencies that arise in human interaction. In this essay I conceptualize the Burkean parlor as a representative anecdote for existentialism and then analyze two works of existentialist literature through a Burkean lens: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the Underground . I’ve chosen these two works because Beckett and Dostoevsky did not write philosophical essays explicating existentialism to accompany their fiction—like Beauvoir, Camus, and Sartre—but instead sought to articulate the ontological tensions of symbolic action through the presentation of dramatic situations in literary form.