Sisyphus: An Absurd Hero

On of the major playwrights during this period was Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre had been imprisoned in Germany in 1940 but managed to escape, and become one of the leaders of the Existential movement. Other popular playwrights were Albert Camus, and Jean Anouilh. Just like Anouilh, Camus accidentally became the spokesman for the French Underground when he wrote his famous essay, Le Mythe de Sisyphe or The Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was the man condemned by the gods to roll a rock to the top of a mountain, only to have it roll back down again. For Camus, this related heavily to everyday life, and he saw Sisyphus an absurd hero, with a pointless existance. Camus felt that it was necessary to wonder what the meaning of life was, and that the human being longed for some sense of clarity in the world, since if the world were clear, art would not exist.

The Myth of Sisyphus became a prototype for existentialism in the theatre, and eventually The Theatre of the Absurd. Sisyphus is the absurd hero. This man, sentenced to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain and then watching its descent, is the epitome of the absurd hero according to Camus. In retelling the Myth of Sisyphus, Camus is able to create an extremely powerful image with imaginative force which sums up in an emotional sense the body of the intellectual discussion which precedes it in the book. We are told that Sisyphus is the absurd hero as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. (p.89). Sisyphus is conscious of his plight , and therein lies the tragedy. For if, during the moments of descent, he nourished the hope that he would yet succeed, then his labour would lose its torment. But Sisyphus is clearly conscious of the extent of his own misery. It is this lucid recognition of his destiny that transforms his torment into his victory. It has to be a victory for as Camus says: I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. (p.91). Sisyphus' life and torment are transformed into a victory by concentrating on his freedom, his refusal to hope, and his knowledge of the absurdity of his situation.

In the same way, Dr. Rieux is an absurd hero in The Plague, for he too is under sentence of death, is trapped by a seemingly unending torment and, like Sisyphus, he continues to perform his duty no matter how useless or how insignificant his action. In both cases it matters little for what reason they continue to struggle so long as they testify to man's allegiance to man and not to abstractions or 'absolutes'. The ideas behind the development of the absurd hero are present in the first three essays of the book. In these essays Camus faces the problem of suicide. In his typically shocking, unnerving manner he opens with the bold assertion that: There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. (p. 3).He goes on to discover if suicide is a legitimate answer to the human predicament. Or to put it another way: Is life worth living now that god is dead? The discussion begins and continues not as a metaphysical cobweb but as a well reasoned statement based on a way of knowing which Camus holds is the only epistemology we have at our command. We know only two things:This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. (p. 14)

With these as the basic certainties of the human condition, Camus argues that there is no meaning to life. He disapproves of the many philosophers who have played on words and pretended to believe that refusing to grant a meaning to life necessarily leads to declaring that it is not worth living. (p.7) Life has no absolute meaning. In spite of the human's irrational nostalgia for unity, for absolutes, for a definite order and meaning to the not me of the universe, no such meaning exists in the silent, indifferent universe. Between this yearning for meaning and eternal verities and the actual condition of the universe there is a gap that can never be filled. The confrontation of the irrational, longing human heart and the indifferent universe brings about the notion of the absurd.The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. (p.21)and further:The absurd is not in man