Albert Camus

Punishment can only be conquered through pride and rebellion. The myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, describes a comical hero who is happy in the face of terrible and eternal punishment in the underworld. Camus explains Sisyphus’s happiness in that “There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn” (Camus 5). Sisyphus overcame his eternal torment by simply by disdaining his punishment and punishers. Thus, adversity can be…

“The life of man is a struggle on earth. But without a cross, without a struggle, we get nowhere. The victory will be ours if we continue our efforts courageously, even when at times they appear futile.” This quote by Boniface Wimmer, a German monk, perfectly sums up the capabilities of the human soul and what is necessary to happen in one’s life to ensure happiness of any kind, which is to surpass struggle. For that reason, the human soul is, by its very nature, designed to fight on despite any…

The existence of violence within literature serves a purpose in the sense that it helps to decipher the personality and background of a character. We psychoanalyze people in our everyday lives based upon the violent nature of a man or woman. In Albert Camus’ The Stranger, the protagonist, Meursault, it is witnessed that this man does not seem to have some sort of abnormal behavior, based on his expressions. However, we cannot judge a person without seeing the true nature of this man. Within the…

Advanced Placement level texts are chosen based on their literary merit or worth. One such novel is The Stranger by Albert Camus. The story describes a young man with a rather indifferent view on the world whose life is permanently altered by one rash decision: murder. After impulsively killing a man on a beach, Meursault is put through a series of tedious trials in which his fate is to be settled. The verdict is unfavorable and Meursault is assumingly put to death though the result of his trial…

of his character. In The Stranger he shows no remorse for his mother and a while later kills an Arab or Native Algerian. The book is set in Algeria in the 1940’s while it was called French-Algeria and under French control. The author of the book Albert Camus was born in Drèan, Algeria and lived a life of poverty. Some of the events that impacted the writing of the book were, the jobs for the French in Algeria, the status of Native Algiers and the executions taken place in Algeria. Understanding…

Albert Camus contributed to a kind of writing consisting of Absurdism. In the book, The stranger, he used characters to demonstrate the absurdness in multiple ways. Albert Camus demonstrated how people who live by the rules of Christianity feel threatened by Meursault, the main character, because he doesn’t conform, in other words, he’s awkward. Meursault excludes himself from emotion in multiple events in the book, while most of the people noticed that he had minimal to no emotion at all.…

Albert Camus was an award-winning French author who expressed his absurdist views on the meaning of life and the purpose of humans in his esteemed novels, especially his 1942 classic The Stranger. The Stranger demonstrates Camus’ absurdist beliefs, sending a message to the world that life is meaningless and that personal values deserve to be defended. In this novel, Camus’ character of Meursault is the “stranger” that the title refers to because he is greatly misunderstood by his society due…

Many novels are open to various interpretations, The Plague by Albert Camus is an example of a novel through which different levels of meaning are created within its pages. The book represents many interesting and contrasting levels of literary works containing both fiction and non-fiction, literal and figurative as well as concrete and metaphysical. Different readers of the novel have various understanding of the text depending on their viewpoints and believes. ‘The Plague is neither deeply…

"Texas Forever" is a mantra Tim Riggins, the main character in the television series, Friday Night Lights, lives by. The premise of the show is how an entire town base their dreams on the game of football and we learn those dreams do not come without compromise. It is easy to identify with the characters in Friday Night Lights because their lives and their situations are believable. When we base our life upon a dream or the person we believe we deserve to be, it can be a tragedy or it can be…

How should we live, in order to "live a good life"? For someone such as Albert Camus, author of The Myth of Sisyphus, living a good life would involve living freely. Camus believed strongly that we as humans should not hope for anything. Nothing is guaranteed to us; we could literally drop dead at any moment. Camus believed everyone should live in the moment. His essays suggest we should accept whatever our actions result in, no matter how bad it is; as long as we find happiness in the present,…