Can absurdist fiction end with responsibility instead of despair?
I’ve been thinking about something while writing a short literary sequel to Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl, which itself is inspired by Kafka's works.
In Hedayat, the circle closes. The narrator sees himself becoming the old man. The self, the shadow, the woman, the corpse, the old man, everything collapses into the same nightmare.
My story asks a slightly different absurdist question: what if the circle does not break, but the narrator still refuses to become the old man? The story is still dark, but it is not nihilistic. The narrator does not find a grand meaning, but finds a direction towards responsibility.
So, my question is:
Can a work still be genuinely absurdist if it ends not in despair, but in a chosen responsibility? Or does that move it away from absurdism and toward existentialism?
Would appreciate hearing thoughts from this community.