French Writer Albert Camus example essay topic

They are inseparable' (from The Myth of Sisyphus) Society is wrong, says French writer Albert Camus. Throughout history people have been taught that adversity yields struggle and anguish, and therefore is a cause of grief which should be avoided. However, in his works Camus uses extremes of human experience– as well as some apparently insignificant experiences– to explore unconventional yet logical emotional responses. Camus was born in the town of Mondavi in Algeria. When his father was killed less than a year later the family moved to Algiers. Camus' lifelong tuberculosis attacks seriously limited his career possibilities: he stayed in Algiers during his younger years, reading and devoting time to the establishment of a working-class theater Later, he joined the Algerian Communist Party but quickly departed with disillusionment.

He entered the field of journalism and subsequently began writing fiction. His political motivation and writing experience eventually moved him away from Algeria, but the beauty of the North African landscape, where the vast, silent sea meets the empty sand beneath a blazing sky, was to play an important role in his works and aesthetics throughout his life. "Dark looked at the sky, the plateau, and, beyond, the invisible lands stretching all the way to the sea. In this vast landscape he had loved so much, he was alone'. (from The Guest) Camus arrived in Paris in 1942 as a member of the French Resistance and an editor of the underground publication Combat. The Stranger had just been published and The Myth of Sisyphus would soon follow. Camus resumed his work in the theater with works like The Misunderstanding, Caligula, and The Just Assassins, and continued his literary success with novels like The Plague and The Fall and the collection of short stories Exile and the Kingdom.

In 1957 he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature. "Since the beginning of time, on the dry earth of this limitless land scraped to the bone, a few men had been ceaselessly trudging, possessing nothing but serving no one, poverty-stricken but free lords of a strange kingdom'. (from The Adulterous Woman) Camus' handful of works deal mostly with several specific issues: loneliness, and man's need to understand his own mental solitude; the error of society's encouragement and reinforcement of negative emotional responses to adversity; the duality (benevolence and malevolence) of man's character; and mortality, including man's endurance of suffering and his lifelong wait for an imminent death. While these general topics seem disturbing, Camus uses them against a backdrop of a frequently absurd world to teach the joy of our ephemeral life. An excellent example of Camus' aesthetic is The Plague, in which the gates of the city of Oran are closed due to an outbreak of plague. Through a core of characters, Camus describes their fear, their confusion, their isolation from loved ones and the outside world, their self-sufficiency, their compassion, and their ultimately inherent humanism as a metaphor for existence. In his classic The Stranger, the character Mersault is condemned to die for killing another man; through the first-person perspective of the novel, however, the reader comes to understand that Mersault is actually condemned for the dangerous realization that life and death are, after all, meaningless.

Less a philosopher than a meditative essayist and a skillful, thoughtful writer, Camus eventually broke from his colleague and mentor Jean-Paul Sartre due to the former's belief in personal rebellion rather than political. His short life and brilliant career were ended by an automobile accident in 1960. He is most closely associated with the post World War II French existentialists. ' what did it mater if he existed for two or twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he has existed'. (from A Happy Death).