Overview
Camus's 1942 essay opens with the claim that there is only one truly serious philosophical problem: suicide. From there he works out a response to what he calls the absurd — the collision between our hunger for meaning and the universe's silence.
Camus wrote The Myth of Sisyphus in occupied France during the Second World War, finishing it in 1941. It was published in 1942 alongside his novel The Stranger, which dramatises many of the same ideas. The essay is his most systematic philosophical statement and is the foundational text of absurdism, as distinct from the existentialism of Sartre.
Key Ideas
The absurd defined
The absurd is not the world's meaninglessness nor our desire for meaning, but the encounter between them.
The three responses
Faith (a leap), suicide (escape), and revolt (living fully despite the absurd) — Camus argues for the third.
Sisyphus as model
The condemned man rolling the boulder forever is Camus's image of a life lived in full awareness of its futility — and it is a happy one.
Quantity over quality
Absurd freedom is measured by intensity and variety of experience rather than accumulated accomplishments.
Philosophical suicide
To resolve the absurd through religious or metaphysical leaps is, for Camus, a betrayal of clear thinking.
Who should read this
Readers at the edge of a philosophical crisis — one of those moments when the ordinary framework of meaning stops being convincing. Also useful for readers who want to understand the mid-century existentialist tradition from a voice that is clearer than Sartre and more literary than Kierkegaard.
Who might skip it
Skip if you are currently in a fragile mental state; the essay opens with a direct discussion of suicide and does not soften its treatment of it. Skip also if you want systematic argument; Camus is a novelist working in philosophical mode, and the essay moves associatively.
The verdict
A book that can be a ladder out of nihilism if you read it at the right moment. Camus's central move — that the recognition of the absurd does not lead to despair but to a clearer kind of joy — is a genuine philosophical contribution, not just a literary flourish. The Justin O'Brien translation is the standard English text; the Robin Buss one is more readable.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
If you liked this
The Stranger for the novelistic version of the argument. The Rebel for Camus's later political philosophy.