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moment, a time of narrative and virtue contention, from an existential ethical perspective?
Absurdity as a Metaphor
Fundamentally, Camus understood absurdity as a desire for clear understanding in a world lacking universality and in which contradiction is a given. Such an environment challenges one to make sense of everyday circumstances and to find meaning in existence. It was within “The Myth of Sisyphus” that Camus presented one of his clearest descriptions of an absurd existence; in the preface he wrote, “The fundamental subject of ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ is this: is it legitimate and necessary to wonder whether life has a meaning?” (v). As opposed to providing an explicit definition of the term absurd in his work, Camus created vivid characters who illustrated the concept. He also provided a broad description of how absurdity surfaces in everyday life; in other words, he painted a picture of absurdity within the human experience. Although Camus himself never truly defined the concept, this has not discouraged other scholars from attempting to fill that void.
Both Joseph McBride (3–8) and Robert Solomon (34–35) equated the absurd specifically with the idea that life holds no meaning. According to Cruikshank, absurdity for Camus represented “the conclusion arrived at by those who had assumed the possibility of a total explanation of existence by the mind but who discover instead an unbridgeable gulf between rationality and experience” (Cruickshank 49). The meaninglessness of life is one aspect of Camus’s absurdity, but to suggest that it supplies a full definition misses the complexity of Camus’s use of the term. A fuller discussion of the interpretation of absurdity is provided in chapter 3 and wrestles with these various interpretations in light of Camus’s own work. But whether one describes absurdity primarily in terms of meaninglessness or in terms of life’s inherent contradictions, the connection between these two are consistent with Camus’s use of the term. Camus considered absurdity a given in everyday life. Though