The individual seeks to understand the world, to clarify it by his reason, and instead finds the world to be irrational. Examples of things that give rise to the absurd include mortal man’s revolt against time, the separation of man from nature, the mechanical or routine life of men (as Sartre portrayed it in Nausea) and death itself. The absurd arises from the confrontation of the individual and the world but also is the only thing that unites them. On the one hand is humankind with its reason and desire for clarity and on the other is the world which confronts it. He defines the absurd as a relationship or comparison involving a contradiction or an impossibility.

In the first part, Camus uses Absurd Reason to analyze the meaninglessness of life and to reject suicide as a response to it. In 1942, its place in the essay was taken by a chapter on Dostoevsky. In later editions it was added as an appendix. This was originally a chapter in the third part but was excluded by the censors when the essay was first published in France. There is also an appendix, Hope and the Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka.

Finally, the fourth part, the Myth of Sisyphus, presents Camus’s theory in the form of his interpretation of the Greek myth of Sisyphus. The third part, Absurd Creation, looks at the treatment of the absurd in artistic creation, specifically literature. The second part is the Absurd Man, which consists of the presentation of three types of characters who in Camus’s view live the life of an individual who recognizes the absurd without seeking to escape from or resign oneself to it.

The first part, an Absurd Reason, explains how an individual’s reason discovers and confronts the absurd and the various consequences that can come from that. A more contemporary work that can be fruitfully analyzed from the standpoint of the absurd is the film Groundhog Day. In the event, each of these works was ultimately published separately. The other works were his novel, The Stranger, and his play, Caligula, both of which deal with an individual’s confrontation with the absurd. In this essay published in 1942, Albert Camus sets out his theory of the “absurd.” According to the biographer Herbert Lottman, Camus intended this essay to be published as part of a cycle.

The stranger and the myth of sisyphus