Absurdity in Albert Camus’ The Stranger Essay -- The Outsider Essays

The word senseless or silliness is very peculiar in that there is no clear definition for the term. Merriam-Websters Online Dictionary gave its definition of pissed as having no sane or orderly relationship to hu public life vacuous, also miss order or value. Many existential philosophers have defined it in their own manner. Soren Kierkegarrd, a pre-World War II German philosopher, defined absurd as that quality of Christian faith which runs counter to all healthy human expectation (Woelfel 40). Jean-Paul Sartre a post-WW II French philosopher, felt that absurd was the sheer contingency or thereness or gratuitousness of the initiation (Woelfel 41). Both of these definitions argon hard to interpret and for the most part are not how Camus viewed the word absurd. Camus gives his interpretation of absurd in his book The Myth of Sisyphus, which is the point at which man realizes that all the struggles that we put forth in a perennial daily cycle are in all actuality completely meaningless (Woelfel 44). In James W. Woelfels book, Camus A Theological Perspective, he gives us Camus point of absurdity in detail, I have said that the world is not absurd. Neither is man the strange animal absurd. What is then? The absurd, Camus says, is but the relationship between man, who demands ultimate rationality, and his irrational world the confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world (Camus, Myth 21). man experiences himself as other than his natural environment and as wanting more(prenominal) than it can yieldnature has produced a being with needs it cannot fulfill. The apposition of the human need for ultimate meaning with the ultimate lack of meaning yielded by the universe is the a... ...tranger. Storybites.com. Storybites, 2011. Web. 26 August 2015.Absurd. Merriam-Websters Online Dictionary. http//www.merriam-webster.com/ Web. 26 August 2015.http//www.merriam-webster.com/ vocabulary/absurd Braun, Lev. Albert Camus Moralis t of the Absurd. Cranbury Associated UP, 1974. Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. Trans. Justin OBrien. reinvigorated York Vintage, 1955. ---. The Stranger. Trans. Matthew Ward. New York Vintage, 1988. Ellison, David R. Understanding Albert Camus. capital of South Carolina U of South Carolina P, 1990. Masters, Brian. Camus A Study. London Heinemann, 1974. McCarthy, Patrick. Camus The Stranger. Cambridge UP, 1988. Todd, Oliver. Albert Camus A Life. Trans. Benjamin Ivry. New York Knopf, 1997. Woelfel, James W. Camus A Theological Perspective. New York Abingdon, 1975.