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

The Absurd Heroes Of The Stranger (The Out billetr) and The falsehood of Sisyphus   In The Myth of Sisyphus, Sisyphus is an besotted hero because he realizes his situation, does not appeal, and yet continues the struggle. The purpose of this essay is to lay out that The Stranger is, in narrative style, also showing us an anomalous 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 feel and I try that I exist. This world I can touch and likewise adjudicate that it exists. There ends all my knowledge and the rest is construction. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that self-reliance the gap will never be filled. So for Camus one finds that purport has value moreover no meaning. Meaning implies whatsoever sort of goal, some teleological approach, and, for Camus, t here is no goal. Life is not a pilgrimage, destruction is not an open door, but it is a closed and blank hem in 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 means wild, insensible (from that side of it we still use the word in mathematics a surd is an irrational number). But Camus concentrates on the other meaning which comes from the root. That is, deaf, silent. There are many examples in literature of this particular kind of silence. I deal 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 blue and mortal specks on a minor planet, in an ordinary solar system, located no place in particular, in infinite space, and clear to all sorts of dark irrational forces, ov er which we have little control. We must live and must die with the fear and anxiety, the meaninglessness, frustration and futility that people instantly know. One must live in the present moment and feat to find out the actual, bare, given facts of human existence to find them out, to looking at 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 worse than recall the epigraph which Camus uses at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus. He quotes from the Greek poet, Pindar, writing in the fifth century B.C. O my soul, do not aspire to immortal live, but exhaust the limits of the possible.