existentialist posthumously. Sartre derived his inspiration from Martin Heidegger and embraced the term, but he was hardly the only one to flirt with such thinking. Many philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Albert Camus and Fyodor Dostoyevsky were also influential existentialists. Although this branch of philosophy theorizes over many facets of human existence, one of its most innovative proposals was the true meaning of life. Scholar Frederick Copleston explains
stripped of their unquestioned status. One would assume that the dissipation of such illusions would be up the alley of part-time philosopher and full-time writer Albert Camus, who had eloquently laid out his opinions on such human constructs in his Myth of Sisyphus. Much like the cursed king of Greek myth, man’s search for meaning in an absurd world was an endless and fruitless task, doomed to go on forever. Abandoning reason to place one’s faith in an imaginary God or supposedly immutable calling was
for his life and freedom, he angered the gods and ended up in Tartarus, condemned to accomplish the meaningless task he is famous for; thus, for eternity. In 1942, Albert Camus chose this myth to illustrate his concept of the absurd man. In his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus affirms that the main character of this myth is an absurd hero because he is conscious
tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. (Qtd. in Pratt, para. 12.) Other well-known motifs that express the existential nihilist's perspective of life include the Greek tale of Sisyphus, first noted by novelist Albert Camus in his 1942 book The Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was a cruel king in Corinth who was condemned to spend eternity rolling a huge boulder up a mountain, knowing full well that once he reached the top it would again only come rumbling back down, yet