Albert Camus

Throughout the novel, Camus illustrates Meursault as an emotionally detached man. Beginning with this passage, Camus introduces Meursault’s nonchalant attitude, and therefore begins to develop a careless, emotionless tone. When Meursault states, “That tells me nothing. It could have been yesterday,” and neglects to exhibit any concern about how his mother died, the reader can determine that Meursault is more concerned about when his mother died than he is that she died at all (Camus 3). Soon…

The universal challenge of maintaining individuality is explored in both J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye and Stephen Chbosky’s film The Perks of Being a Wallflower, yet is approached differently due to contrasting contexts. Both protagonists struggle to withstand the values of their society which conflicts with their own and to succeed despite the expectations placed upon them. As a result of their respective time periods, Holden Caulfield approaches these obstacles with pessimism…

Michel Foucault (1926-84) was a great French philosopher, thinker, theorist and a literary critic in the second half of the twentieth century. His theories are largely concerned with the relationship between power and knowledge. He was born in Poitiers in France where his father was a prominent surgeon. Foucault was well versed in French, Latin and Greek. He focussed much on the study of Philosophy and studied deeply Kant, Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche and most importantly, Heidegger and Althusser. He…

Saleem Sinai – a native alien and a hopeless and hapless victim of history, leads a life of anguish and isolation. Since he cannot undo the historical injustices and establish his “rootedness”, he takes recourse to fantasy and myth to discover his “imaginary roots” which lies here and everywhere, dispersed and scattered. Saleem seeks to resolve his agonizing problems of identity by withdrawing himself into the realm of fantasy: Saleem sees the isolated facts of history only as they relate to him…

Break Free “…Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere, we’re all going to die.” – Ryan Ridley, Actor The above statement was by Ryan Ridle (Morty), from the animated TV show Rick and Morty. In this series Morty travels through different dimensions therefore knows that his existence isn’t real when he’s in a different dimension other than his own. This thought fits perfectly with Michael Popper’s confusion, in Watanabe’s Kid’s Story (2013). This connects with the film in the sense that…

Keats' Philosophy of Life And Death A man who avoids death will never mature, and he will never profoundly understand and solve the problem of existence. In life, people inevitably encounter a variety of problems, the limited life and unlimited desires, the eternal desire to live with the inevitable death of the fate of the contradictions, etc., contained in the lives of everyone , Thus constituting the predicament of human existence. Life and death, as a phenomenon, reflects people's concern…

The central idea of the poem “Futility” by Wilfred Owen is war. Owen’s choice of title ‘Futility” highlights his views on the subject. That being - war is pointless and bears no honour or glory. Owen stresses that war only causes destruction and death. The poem is about a soldier who has recently died on the front line of the war. Although we as readers do not know who the dead soldier is; it appears that the speaker knows him and his background well. The speaker wants to move the soldier’s…

It’s common knowledge that life isn’t worth living, anyhow (The Stranger,121). His belief that life is meaningless allows him behave immorally and to accept his death without feeling any remorse. Right before Meursault dies, he says, I opened myself for the first time to the tender indifference of the world (The Stranger, 129) A poetic line that reinforces the idea that Meursault’s nihilism causes his amorality and disregard for his own life by reminding himself that life does not care about…

In the novel Anthem, written by Ayn Rand, the protagonist of the story struggles with the ethicality of his actions and his choice to write about the events that happened to him throughout his life. Due to the society Equality grew up in, he was under the belief that writing his personal opinions was a grave transgression that he would be punished for. This was the reason the novel began with the phrase “It is a sin to write this,”(2). However, by the end of the novel, Equality’s belief grew and…

Artists and authors often tell a tale involving some form of suffering. One of these tales, Icarus, describes the story of a boy falling out of the sky. Throught the variations of this story, Icarus’s suffering is ignored. Both Author of “Musee des Beaux Arts,” W.H. Auden and Pieter Brueghel, artist of The Fall of Icarus, develop the theme of suffering in Icarus through their artistic mediums. Auden and Brueghel both use position of objects to show suffering. In contrast, the authors differ in…