ABSTRACT
The document most cited in discussions of Absurdity is a collection of essays called The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, who is most widely known as the author of The Outsider and The Myth, philosopher of the Absurd and an existentialist. Camus denied, in an interview in 1951 that he was either a philosopher or an existentialist, and indeed said that The Myth was intended as a rebuke to so-called existentialists. In 1938 Camus published Noces in which four basic themes emerge: the hopelessness of life, the need to ‘refuse’ the world without renouncing it, the purity of the heart, and happiness. The feeling of Absurdity, Camus says, could strike any man in the face at any street-corner. Camus distinguishes two kinds of suicide, physical and philosophical, and rejects both. L’Etranger was completed in 1939, a year before Camus finished The Myth, and both were published within months of one another in 1942.
