The Myth of Sisyphus

Largely mythical but possibly based on an historical figure from ancient times, Sisyphus is widely credited as a founder of the Greek city Ephyra, which grew to become Corinth. He’s also described as a power-hungry and ruthless leader who seduces his niece in a plot to kill his own brother. It’s said that a local river god’s daughter was abducted by Zeus, who meant to have his way with her; Sisyphus happened to see the direction they were headed and offered this information to the river god in exchange for a permanent spring inside his city. For this and other sins, after his death Sisyphus was punished by the gods with the excruciatingly pointless and eternal task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, watching it fall back down, and pushing it up again.

Sisyphus symbolizes The Myth of Sisyphus’s main theme, the absurdity of existence. Camus connects Sisyphus’s suffering with that of ordinary humans who must slog through a repetitive existence, only to have it end futilely in death.

Active as an author in the mid-to-late 1800s, Fyodor Dostoevsky (pronounced dos-tuh-YEV-skee) is widely considered one of the early existentialist writers, with a dozen novels and other works to his credit. Camus admires him for contemplating suicide as a revolt against the absurdity of a life that requires a god but has none. Dostoevsky’s character Kirilov wants to draw a picture, to be found after his death, which contains “a face sticking out his tongue at ‘them’” (107). Camus also compliments Dostoevsky for showing how absurdity affects ordinary people and their anxieties. Still, Camus criticizes the author for failing to sustain his absurd vision and instead retreating to beliefs about immortality and the afterlife.

One of the early developers of Existential thought, and one of Camus’s touchstones, Nietzsche wrote works during the late 19th century that argued that the humanity’s prized beliefs—a righteous God, the glory of the nation, the value of earnest striving—have been overturned by the stark discoveries of modern science, and that the task of the great person is to live boldly in a meaningless world. Among his conclusions was that the only true relief from the anxiety of emptiness might be insanity.

Widely considered the founder of existentialism, Kierkegaard was an early 1800s philosopher who struggled with the absurdities of an irrational universe and resolved the dilemma by taking a “leap of faith” into the arms of God. Many subsequent existentialists who didn’t believe in God took a similar leap into some form of belief in an eternal truth about the universe. Camus believes this is an arbitrary stance that causes all of them to bypass the pain and wisdom of uncertainty and thereby commit “philosophical suicide.” Nonetheless, Camus admires Kierkegaard for his insights and his courageous, if not totally successful, attempts to face unbearable truths.

A late 19th- and early 20th-century German philosopher, Husserl developed the field of phenomenology, which studies human consciousness and its relationship to the world. Phenomenology doesn’t have a belief system about how consciousness functions; instead, it contains a set of philosophical tools for exploring consciousness. Husserl’s insights influenced existentialism and Camus, who nevertheless decried Husserl’s belief that there are immutable truths that lie behind all perceptions, truths that exist whether or not they’re perceived, a position Camus criticized as “a metaphysic of consolation” (46).

An early 20th-century author whose works bristle with absurdities, Kafka is highly regarded as a cataloguer of emptiness. His characters struggle without success against unfair fates; their hopeless lives echo the frustrations and humiliations suffered by all humans, in one form or another. Kafka’s novel The Trial describes a man who’s accused and convicted of a crime that’s never explained to him; The Castle tells of a man summoned to a town managed by a secretive castle, whose managers never explain fully to the visitor why he’s been called. In The Metamorphosis a young man slowly transforms into a giant insect; his family rejects him, and he starves to death. Camus lauds Kafka’s thorough examination of absurd situations, but as with Dostoevsky, he criticizes Kafka for ultimately failing to stand by his convictions and instead retreating into a vague hopefulness.

Don Juan is a legendary figure in Western literature whose story has been recounted by various artists, including author Tirso de Molina, composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, and poet Lord Byron. His characteristics have become archetypal in fiction: A Don Juan is a womanizer who engages in serial romances.

Don Juan never settles down, believing that love at its best is temporary, and that it’s better to love intensely for a brief time than to shackle himself and a partner to an oppressively permanent relationship, which he believes is as selfish as a short fling. Camus muses, “Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?” (69). For Camus, Don Juan represents the awareness that life is meaningless, that obeying social mores is futile, and that the best life is one lived thoroughly, with as many experiences as possible.

Like the Don Juan, the actor interacts intensely with many people, except those people are characters that the actor portrays. Like the Don Juan, the actor’s experience is fleeting, but the actor thus can experience, in condensed form, many lives. These portrayals filter those lives to their essential values and present a distilled version of them to audiences: “Within three hours he must experience and express a whole exceptional life” (80). The meaning of the characters’ lives, or the lack of meaning, quickly becomes clear, as does the tragedy of their failures.

Also referred to as the adventurer, Camus’s conqueror knows that life ultimately has no meaning, and that striving gets people nowhere; instead, the conqueror lives simply for the sheer joy of action. “The truths that come within my scope can be touched with the hand” (89). Quests and conquests fade to unimportance over time, but the power of action gives, at least for a while, a certain regal nobility to the one taking action. A grand adventure that ends up nowhere is better, to the conqueror, than a quiet life of study. Both are equally meaningless, but the quest is more satisfying.