A Comparison of the Heroes Of The Stranger (The Outsider) and The Myth

The loaded Heroes Of The Stranger (The Outsider) and The Myth of Sisyphus   In The Myth of Sisyphus, Sisyphus is an absurd hero because he realizes his situation, does not appeal, and yet continues the struggle. The decision of this essay is to demonstrate that The Stranger is, in narrative style, also reconcileation us an absurd hero, or the beginning of an absurd hero in Meursault. In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus establishes the epistemology on which he bases all his works. Ant its a very simple epistemology. He says This heart within me I quality and I judge that I exist. This world I can contact lens and likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge and the rest is construction. amid the certainty I abide of my earth and the content I gauge to give to that assurance the gap will never be filled. So for Camus adept finds that life has value but no meaning. Meaning implies rough sort of goal, some teleological approach, and, for Camus, there is no g oal. Life is not a pilgrimage, death is not an open door, but it is a unsympathetic and blank wall which functions finally, of course, to force us to concentrate on life. In Camus there is a precise use of the word absurd. Absurd comes from the Latin surdis and in surdis we have a dual definition it meat irrational, insensible (from that side of it we still use the word in math a surd is an irrational number). But Camus concentrates on the other meaning which comes from the root. That is, deaf, wordless. There ar many examples in literature of this particular signifier of silence. I think of Romeo and Juliet when Juliet has been ordered by her parents to marry the County Paris, and in one of Shakespeares best scenes in that play, he has Juliets father talking... ...e. But rather we are shown as small and mortal specks on a minor planet, in an ordinary solar system, located no place in particular, in infinite space, and subject to all sorts of dark irrational forces, over whi ch we have little control. We must live and must die with the fear and anxiety, the meaninglessness, frustration and futility that people today know. One must live in the present moment and attempt to find out the actual, bare, given facts of human existence to find them out, to face them and to live with them. Camus does this no more and no less. He becomes, as it were, a saint without a God. One could do worsened than recall the epigraph which Camus uses at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus. He quotes from the Greek poet, Pindar, pen in the 5th century B.C. O my soul, do not target to immortal live, but exhaust the limits of the possible.