The Tragedy of the Human Condition: A Review of The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis
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Albert Camus began The Myth of Sisyphus in 1940, during the fall of France, and Gallimard published it in 1942. The essay opens on a question most philosophy handles at arm’s length: whether life is worth living at all. Eighty-four years later it remains in print, and at 160 pages in the current Vintage International paperback it is short enough for a single sitting and dense enough to reward a second.

The argument compresses to a few lines. The world gives no answers to the questions people most want answered. Camus calls the collision between those two facts the absurd, and he rules out both of the usual exits from it: despair, and a leap into belief. What he proposes instead is a lucid, stubborn way of living.

The Author and the Book’s Publication History

Camus was born on 7 November 1913 in Mondovi, French Algeria. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, at 44 the second-youngest laureate in the category after Rudyard Kipling, for work the committee said “illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times.” He died in a car crash near Sens, France, on 4 January 1960, aged 46.

Le Mythe de Sisyphe came out from Gallimard in 1942, the same year as his novel The Stranger. The essay has four chapters and an appendix on Franz Kafka, “Hope and the Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka.” Justin O’Brien’s translation first carried it into English in 1955, and Knopf issued it that year as part of The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. The edition linked at the end of this review is the Vintage International paperback, published on 6 November 2018.

The Question the Book Opens With

Camus does not ease in. His first claim is that the one genuinely serious philosophical question is suicide, meaning whether life is worth living, which he treats as prior to every other problem a philosopher might take up. Critics sometimes object that suicide is an act, not a question. Camus’s reply is the rest of the book.

His answer is no, and the reasoning matters more than the verdict. The essay does not recommend self-destruction. It argues that the honest alternative to both suicide and false hope is to keep living in revolt and defiance, fully aware that nothing guarantees the effort will be repaid.

If this subject is close to home for you or someone you know, call or text 988 in the United States to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

Aged bridle-leather briefcase on an oak desk beside a paperback and brass lamp

What Camus Means by the Absurd

The absurd, in this book, is neither a mood nor a property of the universe. It is a relationship. On one side stands a mind with a “wild longing for clarity.” On the other stands what Camus calls the “unreasonable silence of the world.” Neither side alone is absurd. A silent universe with nobody asking questions would simply be silent, and a mind content with silence would have no quarrel with it. The absurd exists only while both are held in view together.

“The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.”

(Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, as quoted in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)

That definition has a practical edge. If the absurd is a tension, then resolving it in either direction destroys it. Explaining the silence away with a doctrine, or deciding the longing is a mistake and switching it off, ends the problem by abandoning one of its terms. Camus counts both as evasions.

Why Camus Refuses the Leap

The middle of the essay surveys thinkers who saw the same gap and, in Camus’s judgment, fled it. Kierkegaard and Shestov turn toward God or faith. Husserl lifts reason into abstract forms. Jaspers and Heidegger are named among the company too. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that the book was written against these figures even though Camus shares their starting point in recognizing absurdity; the quarrel is over what to do next. His name for the move is “philosophical suicide,” a way of surviving the problem by giving up the thinking that produced it.

Revolt, Freedom, Passion

With the leap refused, the essay has to say what living looks like. Camus draws three consequences from the absurd: revolt, freedom and passion. Revolt means refusing both comfort and surrender, holding the confrontation open instead of resolving it. Freedom means acting without a purpose handed down from above. Passion means living with intensity, without waiting for a verdict that never arrives.

Four figures show how this looks in practice. Don Juan lives the passionate life to the fullest. The actor lives ephemeral lives for ephemeral fame. The conqueror gives up promises of eternity to act fully inside history. The creator describes experience without explaining or judging it. Each is a life that can be complete without an appeal beyond itself.

Ancient limestone columns on a Mediterranean hillside at golden hour

Sisyphus, and the Case for His Happiness

The title figure comes from Greek myth. Sisyphus was the founder and first king of Ephyra, the original name of Corinth, and the sources disagree about his offense. Some say he exposed Zeus’s abduction of Aegina to her father, the river god Asopus. Others say he killed guests in breach of the rules of hospitality. Another version has him cheating death by chaining Thanatos, so that no one died until Ares freed him. Homer places him in the underworld in Book XI of the Odyssey, where he must roll a huge boulder up a steep hill, and each time it rolls back before he reaches the top.

Camus makes him the absurd hero of the final chapter. The reading hinges on consciousness. Sisyphus knows exactly what his task is and exactly how it ends, which makes him, in Camus’s phrase, “superior to his fate.” A punishment built on hopelessness loses its force against a man who has stopped hoping and keeps pushing anyway.

The essay’s closing lines compress the whole position:

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

(Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus. Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)

The line is often misread as cheerfulness. The happiness it describes is closer to the satisfaction of a man who has stopped expecting the boulder to stay at the top and finds his own open-eyed defiance sufficient. Whether that persuades is a separate matter.

Existentialist or Not? Where Critics Push Back

Even the label attached to the book is contested. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says the essay belongs squarely in the existentialist tradition, yet records that Camus denied being an existentialist, a label Sartre accepted. The two men’s friendship was on again and off again, and The Rebel (1951), with its rejection of communism, brought about the final split, according to Wikipedia’s account of his life. A fair description is a philosopher of the absurd who shares existentialism’s starting point and parts company at the conclusion.

The sharper criticism targets the ending. Philip Villamor, writing in Philosophy Now, argues that Camus’s Sisyphus cannot be a man who loves struggle for its own sake. He pictures instead a Sisyphus who loves sunshine and freedom, keeps schemes alive to escape his punishment and holds on to hope, and he closes with a revision of Camus’s line: “One must imagine Sisyphus hopeful, and more human.”

A related question comes from the Kafka appendix. Camus argues that Kafka fails as an absurd writer because his work keeps a glimmer of hope. A reader can fairly ask how much of literature survives a test that strict.

Watch: The Myth of Sisyphus in Under Five Minutes

TED-Ed’s animated lesson by Alex Gendler retells the myth in 4 minutes 38 seconds, a useful companion to the ancient story behind the essay:

Lone figure in silhouette walking down a steep hill toward a boulder at dusk

Frequently Asked Questions

Is The Myth of Sisyphus a novel?
No. It is a philosophical essay, built from an argument about the absurd, a set of illustrative figures, and a retelling of the Greek myth that gives it its title.

Does Camus argue in favor of suicide?
No. He starts from the question and rejects suicide as the answer. The alternative he defends is living in revolt and defiance of the absurd, with full awareness that no answer is coming.

Was Camus an existentialist?
He denied it. The essay shares existentialism’s starting point, and Sartre accepted the label Camus refused, but Camus argued that the existentialist thinkers he names escape the absurd instead of staying with it.

Do I need to read The Stranger first?
No. The two books appeared in the same year, 1942, but the essay builds its own argument and can be read on its own.

How long is it, and which edition does this review link to?
The Vintage International paperback linked below is listed at 160 pages and was published on 6 November 2018.

Where to Read It

The Myth of Sisyphus (Vintage International) is the paperback edition this review links to, published on 6 November 2018 (affiliate link).

Further Reading

Ivy Ngeow reads the essay as a case for why writers keep writing: effort with no guaranteed result, where the struggle itself supplies the satisfaction. Her post, “The Myth of Sisyphus: Is it Why Writers Write?”, appeared on the WRITE NGEOW blog in March 2018.

Philip Villamor’s “Reimagining Sisyphus”, in Philosophy Now issue 75, is a compact counter-reading of the ending. The magazine limits how many articles can be read free each month.

Sources

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