There is a failure in the Hegelian project of obtaining absolute spirit, precisely because of our tendency to not look at the particulars of various contexts and situations as time goes on. Similarly to Nooman, Valentine claims ‘For humanity everything passes without a trace’. We know that things change, we’ve been told since childhood that things change, we’ve witnessed things change ourselves many a time, and yet we’re utterly incapable of noticing the moment that change comes – or we search for change in all the wrong places. Screw the years–we don’t notice things change. The problem is we don’t notice the years pass, he thought.

It merely confirms a desired pictorial image we have (or want to have) about ourselves. It doesn’t matter for what or by whom we are praised, hence Nooman highlights the absurdity of being “famous” for three or four people in a rather niche setting. Yet ultimately such wanting of praise acts merely as an ego-defence mechanism, in order to protect ourselves from doubt, anxiety, fear, depression, and so on. Richard Nooman picks up on the human need for validation in our practices, to feel secure about ourselves. It’s an inferiority complex, that’s what it is. Aren’t humans absurd? I suppose we like praise for its own sake. Fame? How famous could we get? He became famous: now he’s known to three. It’s funny, I wonder why we like being praised. Especially by General Lemchen, in spite of himself. There is a deep seated malaise within both Richard Nooman, an engineer and supplier to the local scientific institute, and his colleague Valentine Pillman, about man’s status in regards to his existence now the Zone is present.

Yet this entails that man is thus no better then what he sets himself apart from i.e. Anything good that can be said of man, is that he can be said to have the ability to continue to survive. This leads to a denial of man’s supposed greatness. There are also epistemological and existential failures, an intellectual pessimism one could say, caused by the Zone. There is a failure – not just on sociological, cultural and economic levels – whereby government and societal institutions fail to prevent Stalkers bringing artefacts out of the Zone to sell onto the black market, as well as the various adverse effects had on the citizens of Harmont due to the Visit. The Hegelian notion of the progression of self-consciousness, similar to their other novel Hard to Be a God (1964), and a focus on humanist ideals are called into question throughout the work.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic (1971) can be seen as a critique of perceived humanist and enlightenment tendencies within scientific culture.

Roadside picnic book