But does this situation dictate death? Camus ponders upon the problem of suicide and contemplates then whether suicide is the only answer to this absurd world which doesn’t answer anything. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. In a universe, divested of meaning or illusions, a man feels a stranger. In the ‘Myth of Sisyphus’, he terms the world as absurd because it doesn’t offer any answer to the question of existence, it being a silent spectator to the suffering of whole humanity. He is not an easy writer to read, agreed, but his writings are not disturbing, specially if one gets to understand that his writing, whether The Stranger or ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, is a declaration of writer’s notion that the life must be lived fully in awareness of the absurdity of this world. It wouldn’t be an overstatement or some form of fervent adherence to the writer if I admit that he inspired the mind to seek more and not be satisfied till the response unites the thought and the experience. What is more, his ideas also, even now influence the readers like me in whose face the “why” of existence suddenly strikes one fine day. The idea of repetition which he proposed with Sisyphus, which in turn was inspired by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s Repetition, is witnessed significantly in the works of Beckett too. In that sense, he may be termed as a radical and approached with scepticism, but it cannot be ignored that the ideas he proposed came to influence the generation of writers engaged in the works of absurd, for example, Samuel Beckett who contributed significantly to the Theatre of Absurd. He is one writer, who has never been afraid of opening his heart, his thoughts, anything which plagues his mind, before his readers, before this world. Now this is what keeps me in awe of the writer. But does nothing have any meaning? I have never believed we could remain at this point.”** If we assume that nothing has any meaning, then we must conclude that the world is absurd. I was trying to make a “tabula rasa,” on the basis of which it would then be possible to construct something. When I analyzed the feeling of the Absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus, I was looking for a method and not a doctrine. “This word “Absurd” has had an unhappy history and I confess that now it rather annoys me. As he matured as a writer, Camus himself felt annoyed at his proposed idea of absurd. We can notice the change in the focus of the writer, which turned from inner to outer, from individual to social as he moved from one work to the other. His more mature works, like The Rebel and The Plague, came later on where Rebel dealt with the problem of “murder” as against the problem of “suicide” which he dealt in ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’. At this time he was in Algiers, his native land, far from the hubbub of Paris. The penning of The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, which he did almost simultaneously, came at a point when he himself faced despair about the kind of life he was living, which included his anxiety about his future as a writer and finding his place in the World. When compared with different periods of his life, his writings offer an insight into the state of mind Camus was often fraught with. Sartre is an existentialist, and the only book of ideas that I have published, The Myth of Sisyphus, was directed against the so-called existentialist philosophers.”* When we did get to know each other, it was to realise how much we differed. Sartre and I published our books without exception before we had ever met. We have even thought of publishing a short statement in which the undersigned declare that they have nothing in common with each other and refuse to be held responsible for the debts they might respectively incur. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked. Although Camus is often categorised as an existential philosopher but he himself never approved of that. While for some, Camus’ ideas are irrelevant when compared with those proposed by existential philosophers. Some readers appreciate his writings though they do not agree with him. It is understandable when some readers avoid reading him, because he seems a difficult writer whose works are taken to be disturbing. Camus, as a writer, receives mixed response from the readers.
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