Sisyphus Research Paper

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Sisyphus suffers through eternal punishment, compelled to push a rock up a hill, only to have it roll down and force him to walk down and start all over. Camus writes that this myth is tragic “because the hero is conscious” (491) of his punishment, because “where would his torture be, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?” (491). If a person can find sorrow in a situation, they have equal capacity to find joy. David Foster Wallace demonstrates this in his commencement address by describing petty and frustrating events, and that he could easily think how disgusting and horrible everything is, but that would be too easy.

He and I were probably bored in class and resorted to mischief to stay interested. His reclusion to discuss his past also suggests that he suffered a tragedy in his childhood, or at least a time period in which life felt uncertain. Cynicism is best described by philosophers like Albert Camus, who suggested that the contemplation of suicide was the only thought humans should consider. In The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus, the story of Sisyphus is compared to life by exemplifying the eternal pointlessness of everyday tasks. Since it was impossible for Sisyphus to successful push the boulder up the hill, why did he not stop?

By referencing the ancient myth of Sisyphus, Taylor made is clear that to him, life is meaningless. He gave us the definition of meaninglessness as being “essentially endless pointless, and meaningfulness is therefore the opposite” (Taylor 5). After being punished by the God’s, Sisyphus rolled a rock up the hill every day, time after time, only for the rock to roll down the hill once again. Taylor sees this

Camus explanations of the Myth of Sisyphus, presented the concept of the absurd by outlining the beliefs that an individuals life has worth but only his live in a world that denies such worth to survive. Therefore, the absurdity in the statement, explains the fact of a clash between the orders through which an individuals mind hard for, likewise the lack of order that we as humans find in the world.

Sisyphus is a shining example of redemption and modesty. In vanity, the dead Sisyphus tricked the gods so he can continue living in the overworld. It was a life he could not get away with, and eventually Jupiter retrieved him and returned him to the underworld, where he was tasked with rolling a stone boulder up a hillside. However, as he reaches the top, the ball is fated to always return to the bottom, forcing Sisyphus to push until the end of time. Despite this soul-crushing eternity, Sisyphus continues to push. While any of us would be miserable with this monotony, Sisyphus is satisfied simply with the challenge. It is a pure modesty that you cannot find anywhere else. It also exudes traces of existential thought; after all, if it has no

Used still today as examples in philosophy and even psychology, the myth of Sisyphus represents the mindset of mortals and reactions to impossible tasks. He acted as a highwayman and as such had privy to godly secrets. He occasionally passed along these secrets, often about the underworld and often for a price. He used what he had learned to capture and confine Death himself, putting him in chains. With Death thus captured, no one in the mortal word could die and the underworld grew quiet and empty, which Hades lamented.

Not only embodying absurdism but speaking it by the end of the novel, Meursault parrots the same conclusion Camus reached in The Myth of Sisyphus, in which Sisyphus is charged with the meaningless task of pushing a rock up a mountain for eternity, each time watching it role back down to the bottom. He understands why his mother took a fiancé as she was approaching death, as if she were starting her life over: she would have

The bleakness of Sisyphus’ punishment is due to its inherent meaninglessness, for despite his efforts, the task has no purpose. This parallels to Lester’s life prior to his acquisition of responsibility. Prior to attempting to enact change in his life, the protagonist continues his monotonous daily routine at his boring desk job, listening to the same soundtrack nightly at dinner, and overall subservience to those around him: “Both my wife and daughter think I’m this gigantic loser and they’re right, I have lost something. I’m not exactly sure what it is but I know I didn’t always feel this…sedated.”

Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a talent and famous writer, who made the concept of absurdity a key concern in each of his oeuvre. For him, the world is not absurd, but life is because we keep asking the world for reasons, and the world never answers us back and never will do it. We are free and alone. We have the ability to choose whatever we want for us. According to Camus’ philosophy, we have only two choices: suicide or just be happy. For example, in the Myth of Sisyphus (1942), one of his philosophical essays, the eponymous hero received a simple and cruel punishment by the gods for stealing some of their secrets. This punishment was to roll a heavy rock uphill, but when he almost got to the mountaintop, the rock rolled back downhill. The

The myth of Sisyphus focuses on a king who was said to be deceitful and spiteful in nature. He was supposedly

What makes life meaningless? Taylor states that there are two characteristics of Sisyphus’s life that make life pointless. The main trademark is the purposelessness of his life. Taylor stresses the way that there is no good reason for the labor that Sisyphus is compelled to do because of the gods. I concur with Taylor that the purposelessness in performing this action demonstrates that his life is good for nothing. Perhaps, as specified in class, if his punishment brought about something advantageous. For instance, when Sisyphus rolled the rocks up the hill, rather than falling back down, they shaped into a beautiful architecture, which would give his life meaning. In the book, Taylor stated, “Activity... even long, drawn out and repetitive activity, has a meaning if it has some significant culmination… activity,” showing that possibly if the rocks did form a figure it could give meaning to Sisyphus’s life. The second characteristic that makes Sisyphus’s life meaningless is the idea of endless repetition of his punishment given by the gods. Taylor claimed that if the act of repetition would have led to an achievement or goal his life may not have been meaningless, yet Sisyphus’s labor did not lead to anything besides pointless repetition.

Sisyphus is by no means a hero in the traditional sense. Although Sisyphus’ life before his torture isn’t of the matter, it is necessary to the explanation of Camus’ description of him as an absurd hero. Before his death Sisyphus paid little regard to the Gods, and if he did it was with levity. In the time after his death, in which he roamed the earth of the living, he further disrespected the Gods by directly disobeying them ultimately leading to his eternal punishment in the underworld. What was his crime? By scratching just the surface one might believe that his disobedience was the only cause of his torment, but, as Camus explains in paragraph four, his other crime was his passion for life. It was those two aspects combined that implemented a foundation for Camus’s argument of him being an absurd hero. The last point that makes Sisyphus and absurd hero is that through his eternal torment, and most importantly his consciousness through it, he came up with the simple conclusion that he still had some control of his life. Because of his passion for life and scorn of the Gods, Sisyphus was able to use the emotions that arose form both statements, as stated in paragraph seven, to reach his victory of the mind. Through his change in perspective he was able to conclude that figuratively he is the master of his fate. The mental strength he gathers through his passions and torture constitute why Camus appointed Sisyphus with the title of an absurd

Camus emphasizes absurdity and happiness to the readers. For example, in the “The Myth of Sisyphus”, he illustrates his thought on the plight of all human beings. Camus states that Sisyphus is happy. He says that Sisyphus is happy because he accepted his tragedy. Even though in the miserable situation, Sisyphus embraced the absurdity. He tells the reader to create their own meaning of life and accept the absurdity. In addition, Camus stood upon the justice. Especially, he rejected the concept of the death penalty.

Taylor broke up his paper into two parts: the meaningless existence and the meaninglessness of life. The first part, meaningless existence, is where Taylor first mentions the story of Sisyphus. He uses Sisyphus as “a perfect image of meaninglessness” (Taylor). He describes the awful and meaningless life that he has. He was punished by the Gods to roll up a heavy rock up a hill, only for it to roll back down (Camus). Sisyphus would then do this process over and over again, until the end of time (Camus).

Albert Camus, French philosopher and writer, and with whom Beckett kept correspondence, is perhaps best well known for his works The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger. Both are representations of his personal philosophy of absurdism, a philosophy which can be seen throughout Waiting for Godot. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus retells the famed Greek myth, where the protagonist, Sisyphus, is fated to roll a stone up a hill for eternity, only for the stone to roll back down just as it approached the top every time. At first glance such a situation would seem to indicate that Camus is a nihilist, as there is no meaning in Sisyphus’s life, other than to futilely roll the boulder. Incredibly, however, Sisyphus does not yield either to the boulder or to reason, as he