Kosinski's Being There and the Existential Antihero Critics have called Kosinski's Being There his worst novel. Perhaps Kosinski's prosaic style is deceptive in its apparent simplicity (especially when compared to The Painted Bird). “What Kosinski seeks to do,” as Welch D. Everman reports, “is to stimulate the reader's creative and imaginative task by offering only the essential... Kosinski's style draws the reader into the incident by refusing to allow him to remain passive " (25). This essay will propose that Dasein is an important existential work that follows in the tradition of Sartre and Camus in which Chance, the main protagonist, mirrors Camus's Mersault in A Happy Death and in which Koskinski demonstrates the logical progression of the existential antihero. An initial response to Being There might often be to focus on the text as a sort of anecdote about Creation, or as social satire, or perhaps as political criticism against the mass media and the television generation. While all of these readings are legitimate, it seems that the starting point should center on Kosinski's protagonist, Chance, to understand the universal significance of the portrayal of Chance, and by implication the reader, as a victim. The case is a contemporary innocent. Whether, as is often claimed, he is mentally disabled or not is irrelevant. Rather, the case simply exists. He watches television, is unable or unwilling to function within prescribed cultural paradigms, and ultimately is simply a mirror, reflecting back to others sublimated images of desires projected onto him. The case is the American common man. The events that happen to him could happen to anyone. He, like all of us, ah...... middle of paper......it, David. Camus. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1988. Works consulted Bruss, Paul. Victims. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1981. Camus, Albert. The stranger. New York: Vintage, 1946. Granofsky, Ronald. "Circle and Line: Modern and Postmodern Constructs of the Self in Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird." Essays in Literature 18.2 (1991): 254-68.Griffiths, Gareth. “Being There, Being There: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism: Kosinski and Malouf.” Ariel 20.4 (1989): 132-48.Grigbsy, John L. "Mirroring America and Russia: Tolstoy's Reflections in Jerzy Kosinski's Being There." Notes on Contemporary Literature 17.4 (1987): 6-8.Kosinski, Jerzy. The painted bird. New York: Bantam, 1978. Lavers, Norman. Jerzy Kosinski. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Piwinski, David J. “Kosinski's Painted Bird.” The explainer 40.1 (1981): 62-3.