The Woman in the Dunes

The concept of futility gets at the heart of many key elements of existentialism, which emphasizes the importance of human freedom and individual experience over objective meaning or knowledge. If something is futile, it is pointless and has no meaning, and existential philosophers debate the very existence of meaning:

Does life have meaning? If so, what gives it meaning? Is purpose something constructed of human will to imbue life with a false sense of meaning? The man, too, wrestles with these ideas, both in the abstract and the concrete.

The idea of shoveling sand night after night just to maintain a difficult and joyless existence initially strikes the man as futile. He understands the impressive, collective power of sand despite each grain’s tiny size, so the effort the villagers make in order to protect their village from sand is preposterous to him. The work is ongoing and endless, and the village is decrepit, so the futility overwhelms him initially. As he says to the woman, “[Y]ou exist only for the purpose of clearing away the sand” (39)—a purpose the man deems neither meaningful nor respectable. In his mind, some purposes have more merit than others.