The Myth of Sisyphus

In "The Myth of Sisyphus" Camus illuminates the concept of the absurdity of life. He explains that the human condition is characterized by the probability of suffering and the certainty of death. This is a fate that the reason of being cannot accept as meaningful. The absurd is observed with the realization that the world is irrational, and man has to face life the way it comes. Man feels his longing for happiness, within him, and for a reason. The absurd is born of the confrontation between the…

Professor Gunderson, I’m sending this from my personal email because I don’t want some of the more personal things I’m going to say to be stuck in my D2L forever. Maybe the fact that this is going to your MSU email is a bit counterproductive, but at least it won’t be in my D2L account and you’re leaving anyway so maybe they’ll wipe your email memory. I hope that you know that what I was saying was mainly tongue-in-cheek. I do not really imagine anyone, let alone yourself, will write…

“is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images” (Kellman). In his works, such as The Stranger, he envelops the ideal of absurdism, which the Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary & Cultural Criticism states that, drawn upon from The Myth of Sisyphus, includes the idea that “in a world without God, human life and human suffering have no intrinsic meaning.” The philosophy stemmed from and closely resembles existentialism, which sees the predicament of existence as “beginning with a…

The myth of Sisyphus is inspiring due to the way in which Sisyphus takes the stress and uses that as a motivator in order to keep moving and surviving. Sisyphus could allow this metaphor for stress, the boulder, stop him from surviving yet he manages to take this obstacle and use it to his advantage. Sisyphus is symbolic of what the average employee should be, a conqueror of stress. Stress is a factor that…

confrontation between our human desire for order, meaning, and purpose in life and the blank, indifferent “silence of the universe”: “The absurd is not in man nor in the world, but in their presence together…it is the only bond uniting them.”(The Myth of Sisyphus, Chapter 2, Absurd Walls) • The Revolt: The companion theme to the Absurd in Camus’s oeuvre is the idea of Revolt. What is revolt? Simply defined, it is the Sisyphean spirit of defiance in the face of the Absurd. More…

The theatre of the absurd is a word coined by the Hungarian critic Martin Esslin to describe the works written during 1950’s and 1960’s.The word ‘absurd’ was first used by French philosopher Albert Camus in his work The Myth Of Sisyphus in which represents the existence of humans as meaningless. Also, Camus believed that since human beings cannot provide a rational explanation for the existence of the universe, hence it can be seen as meaningless, shallow and absurd. Martin Esslin described the…

The Stranger, Albert Camus’ debut novel, illustrates and reflects the view of absurdity of life using the main character, Meursault, as a catalyst. On a surface level, absurdism is perceived through Meursault alone. However, on a deeper level through Meursault, other characters act as a source of absurdity as different situations are forced upon them. Camus achieves this level of complexity by creating and establishing Meursault as a very absent and undistinguished main character, who holds no…

extremely necessary thing in our world. Things happen to every one all the time that we are not expecting, and things that we cannot control. But if I am absurdist I can just accept it for what it is we can change our attitudes about it. In the myth of Sisyphus the absurdist point of view was when the man in the story is forced to keep pushing the rock up the mountain and it keeps rolling down over and over again. Instead of thinking how bad his life is and how horrible it is to push this rock…

Inside Albert Camus’s The Stranger, Camus portrays Meursault as an absurd hero. Meursault was attached to the physical world, and he was different from a normal individual. Meursault would have a direct impact from the “shimmering heat” (17) of the sun, which ultimately caused him to “squeeze his hand around [his] revolver” (59) and kill an Arab. As a result, Meursault had to live in jail, and he had to change his routine. He would spend “sixteen to eighteen hours a day” (79) sleeping, and his…

When writing The Stranger, Albert Camus had other intentions than just giving his audience some story about the life of an indifferent man. The novel itself gives the main character, Meursault, a way of thinking that some would find unimaginable and incomparable to any character that might be seen in another piece of literature. While the book makes an attempt at making sure the reader understands the philosophy of Meursault while progressing through his timeline, the philosophy Meursault…