 Starting after World War I, however, modernists began exploring the stranger themes of life in art, in response to the themes of death being effectively mechanized and made impossible to toy with by the war's graphic depictions.As a result, modernist literature tended to explore the meaning and construction of reality, shifting away from the progressive, cause-and-effect structure of realist fiction towards a more complex and disjointed depiction of reality.After World War II, absurdists carried this focus one step further by placing these common themes in surreal and fantastic settings, turning what would have been otherwise mundane concepts into distinctive, stand-out ones, thus converting the paranoid fiction genre into a legitimate one.