NOTES AND REVIEWS The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger: Two Portraits of the Young Camus Speaking of The Stranger, Jean-Paul Sartre observed in 1947 that "in The Myth of Sisyphus, which appeared a few months later, Camus provided us with a precise commentary upon his work." 1 And certainly the absurd reasoning developed at length in that essay seems to speak directly to the strange indifference of Meursault and his final happy acceptance of a world without meaning. Sartre's view, however, has not found much acceptance among contemporary critics, who justly mark the difference between creative and philosophical truth. 2 That said, I would like to propose here that, in one sense, novel and essay are indeed commentaries on one another. It is that both are concerned with the epistemology of the human condition, with the changes that occur in man's perception of himself, his life, and his world as the individual process of existence runs its course. While The Myth presents Camus's development of absurdism as a raisonnement, that is, as a line of argument, the novel dramatizes Meursault's journey toward the epiphany which, on the eve of his execution, enables him to see clearly for the first time. The Myth offers a sudden insight into a life whose only order is mechanical and artificial. This order is imposed by man himself on an experience otherwise gratuitous. To see through it is to begin to live thoughtfully: "Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness." 3 The essay develops at some length the consequences of this newly conscious existence. One begins, Camus believes, by understanding the world's indifference and also the human desire for reason. If the terms of this dialectic are violated by neither the leap of faith nor by suicide, then man lives in the absurd, that is, in truth. And if he so persists, he is rewarded by a sense of freedom, by the impulse to revolt, by the life force of passion. For absurd man, then, life has three stages. The theatricality of a daily routine ends with the realization that conventional wisdoms are invalidated by existence's ultimate meaninglessness. The feeling of absurdity which follows responds to the misproportion between the demands of consciousness for order and a confronting reality that offers none. But this misproportion, Camus argues, should not cause despair, but rather liberate man to enjoy the life given him unasked: ". . . completely turned toward death (taken here as the most obvious absurdity), the absurd man feels released from everything outside that passionate attention crystallizing in him" (pp. 43-44). Absurdity thus frees man '"An Explication of The Stranger," in Germaine Brée, Camus: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 108. 'See Brian T. Fitch, Narrateur et Narration dans L'Étranger d'Albert Camus, 2nd. ed., rev. (Paris: Librairie Minard, 1968), especially pp. 8-12; also John Cruickshank, Albert Camus and the Literature of Revolt (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1960), pp. 142-63. 'The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O'Brien (New York: Random House, 1955), p. 10. All subsequent references will be noted in the text. Two Portraits of the Young Camus 123