Matheson Through the Lens of the Absurd

Matheson's "Nightmare...", remembering a valid Kierkegaardian anxiety, imagines a soulful existential submission,  an exhibit of such frustration, such utter despair, that its fiction is valuable as an attestation to the horrible implication of the absurd - Matheson's character is impelled to faith in the blackest grief of his reason, madness stepping its quiet motions, beckoning some faraway mortal dread - his woe in the vacuum of close space refers to a stupidly erotic nihilism, an atavistic tendency so kin to humankind as to be incestuous - here we read the verses of the void as though to make a poet of oblivion!

That blessed insanity, which, as Kierkegaard would have, is the ultimate symptom of sublimity, an emphatic constitution of love, trust, commitment, so that the human being sings as though all the psalms of his soul cling to his tongue in exasperation of their freedom.
The insufferable facticity of the experience is, for Matheson's character, a cry to the absurd - for Heidegger, too, truth remains "disclosure," and, to the genuine horror of Shestov, "...truth is truth only because, and only in so far as, it is nailed to the cross." Matheson's character is a Christ in the skies of Golgotha, an Abrahamic personage suffering the lamentation of his faith.

Shestov would not see Matheson's gremlin as a conceptual unknown - as Matheson suggests - but a true, posited window toward the necessary absurd; Necessity, in Shestovian context, is knowledge: in Matheson's tale, the character is at once confronted with the irrational absurdity of apprehending the unknown, placing the thing in a context of the real (the worldhome); by systemically planting the gremlin into the world of the rational, the absurd is violently and necessarily "there." Immediately, the authenticity of the event is determined (by the narrator) as a "chimera worthy of the noblest lunatic."

By appraising the inviolable madness of the situation, Matheson's character probes the product of eternity, the mystic feature of deliverance, by his action of faith, the whole destruction of concern with Reason, which, for Shestov, is the real paradoxical experience. Like Kierkegaard, Shestov's salvation-formula presupposes a certain disinterest in the value of propositional enquiry - rather, it makes the purchase of faith as the end-all; Kierkegaard's Abraham is an exception to an ontological dread, and by offering Isaac as a token of faith, he (Abraham) removes himself from his temporal anxiety through a gesture of unguarded faith.
Because, as Shestov writes, "...if God never deceived us, if no man ever saw the blue sky but knew only an infinite space, empty or filled with ether, if, instead of hearing sounds, men only counted waves - it is probable that they could not have gained much. It may even be that they would have ended by feeling disheartened by their truths and would have agreed to recognize that God may violate His own commandment." (L. Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem).

That Matheson's character was narratively supplied oblivion is an interesting predicament - pressing through the escape door, the narrator is taking that pious leap into the heart of God, into that hateful, offensive unknown; for both Kierkegaard and Shestov hold the texture of faith is incomplete apart from its hideous teleological end - the necessary resignation to a perceived ontological extinction (Kierkegaard's Abraham is even knighted for his capacity to be foolish)!