The Myth of Sisyphus

Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1942

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Part 1

Part 2

Parts 3-4

Part 5

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 5 Summary: “Appendix: Hope and the Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka”

Franz Kafka’s stories of the absurd often hold multiple meanings that force the reader to reread them. They tend to symbolize some idea, but the symbol escapes those who search for it. It’s better to read Kafka’s works innocently, and the symbology will reveal itself.

In Kafka’s novel The Trial a man is tried and convicted of a capital crime, but the nature of the offense is never revealed to him. He continues to live his life after the verdict until two men arrive, take him to a grim part of town, and “slit his throat […] ‘Like a dog’” (125). In other tales, weird things happen to people, but the weirder the thing, the more naturally the victim takes it.

The protagonist of The Trial, Joseph K, accepts his fate calmly: “He will never show sufficient astonishment at this lack of astonishment” (126). In Kafka’s other works, protagonists try to make sense of their predicaments but never succeed. The characters must perpetually oscillate back and forth between logic and absurdity, ordinary events and tragic ones. They are tormented both socially and spiritually.

Like the Greek tragedians—who, for example, show that Oedipus’s horrific fate is foreordained and follows logically from the conditions and decisions of his life—Kafka describes absurd events that unfold from natural circumstances. Kafka’s writings create worlds where the protagonists enjoy “the tormenting luxury of fishing in a bathtub, knowing that nothing will come of it” (129).

The hero of Kafka’s book The Castle is a surveyor summoned to a town managed from a nearby castle; when he gets there, his assignment is uncertain, and all attempts to reach the managers prove futile. Meanwhile, the town avoids him because he’s an outsider. Anxious to understand what the bureaucrats really want from him, the hero persists in trying to reach them and win their approval. This obsession fills his life and, somehow, makes him happy. The Trial describes the essential absurdity of human life, while The Castle proposes a treatment: acceptance.

In The Castle the protagonist finally attaches himself to the Barnabas sisters, whose family is shunned because one of the sisters refused a summons to sexually service a bureaucrat. This effectively “cast her out from the love of God” (133). The protagonist, unable to receive approval from the bureaucrats, tries at last to know where he stands by receiving the castle’s definite rejection.

Kafka’s character thus makes a final, desperate “leap” toward the hope of certainty, “the mark of a lucidity that repudiates itself” (135). Kafka joins the existentialists who, in the end, cannot stomach absurdity and must find an excuse for it. However, this doesn’t invalidate Kafka’s works, which ably illustrate the struggles and pitfalls of human angst.

If life doesn’t matter, then anything less than living it to the fullest will lead to unhappiness. Camus posits that the “more exciting life is, the more absurd is the idea of losing it,” and only that Nietzsche seems to have taken this idea to its conclusion in his writings, “to have derived the extreme consequences of an æsthetic of the Absurd” (137).

For Kafka, and for nearly all existentialists, the Absurd ceases to be tragic because they hope that it can be transcended by some eternal certainty. At that point, the insight is lost.

Part 5 Analysis

The fifth part of The Myth of Sisyphus is an Appendix, basically a critical review of Franz Kafka’s Existential novels and stories. Kafka appeals to Camus because of his weird plots, in which ordinary people suffer from absurd happenings for no apparent reason. These tales symbolize the random emptiness of the human condition. Like the victim in Kafka’s The Trial, who is convicted and executed for a crime that’s never explained to him, we all are condemned to a tragic fate but don’t know why.

For comparison to Kafka, Camus selects the story of Oedipus, a fictional Greek king prophesied to suffer great tragedy, for whom all attempts to thwart that fate merely serve to bring it about. It’s this inevitability of absurd outcomes that Kafka illustrates with protagonists who, despite their innocence, are unable to resolve their punishing fates.

Camus believes absurdity occurs simultaneously on metaphysical and social levels. He cites Nietzsche, who writes that “[g]reat problems are in the street” (127). Life’s meaningless randomness shows up in bureaucratic snafus and the arbitrary attitudes of other people, while a search for answers from God generates only silence. Thus, when bad things happen to good people, they search in vain for solace on both the social and metaphysical planes of life.

Kafka died before The Castle was completed, and he may not have meant for the book to end on so hopeful a note. Still, Kafka, like Kierkegaard, seems to succumb to the irresistible urge to hope for some light of certainty in the darkness of absurdity. For Camus, this amounts to cowardice in the face of Existential doubt. Most of his heroes are existentialists, and nearly all of them disappoint him in the end. They humiliate themselves and consider it a virtue. Camus’s own perpetually absurd torment, then, is to admire philosophers who let him down.

Some critics might argue that even Camus succumbs to the lure of eternal verities because of his insistence that the Absurd remain fresh in our minds at all times. If meaninglessness becomes meaningful, then Camus is no better off than the existentialists whom he criticizes.

Camus, however, is well aware of what might be called “the absurdity of absurdity,” and he understands full well that “it doesn’t mean anything that it doesn’t mean anything.” Lest we search in vain over and over for purpose and validation, Camus would simply have us remember—at least now and then, if we can stand it—that the answer is that there’s no answer.