The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus: Summary and Where to Start

You opened The Myth of Sisyphus, got a few pages in, and stopped. It isn't a long book, you can finish it in an afternoon, and yet it stalls you early. The reason isn't you: it's the door you enter by. The book doesn't have the rhythm of a novel, and there is no plot pulling you from one page to the next. It stacks ideas and expects you to keep up. What follows is a summary of the argument in the order it moves, and a reading route that is not the printed order.

What The Myth of Sisyphus is, and when it was written

The Myth of Sisyphus is a philosophical essay by Albert Camus, from 1942, that starts from one question: is it worth living in a world that does not answer why? The author pronounces his name Camü, with the French u, not "Cami." He was Algerian, the son of a cleaning woman and of a father who died in the First World War before he turned one. He grew up poor in Algiers. The first thing he saw was the sun and the sea, not a library. That matters: the man who wrote one of the driest essays in literature on the lack of meaning loved being alive. In 1942 he is 28, has tuberculosis, lives in France at war, and writes almost at the same time a novel, The Stranger, and this essay. They are the same question in two languages: the novel shows, the essay argues.

The absurd: the word that stops everyone

The absurd, for Camus, is the friction between two surfaces: a human being who needs things to have a reason for being and a universe that does not answer. In everyday speech the word means nonsense, and that is not what it means here. The absurd is not in the world or in you. It is in the encounter between the two.

"The irrational, human nostalgia, and the absurd that arises from their encounter: these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end all the logic of which an existence is capable." (The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus, Brazilian edition by Record, quoted in our translation, chapter The Absurd Walls)

Take away one of the sides, a universe that answers or a person who doesn't ask, and the absurd disappears.

Camus's argument, in five steps

From the problem, to the refusal of two exits, and from there to an image: a man coming down a mountain.

1. The question

The book opens like this: "There is only one truly serious philosophical problem: suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy." (chapter Absurdity and Suicide) Camus does not talk about psychiatry or sadness. He says every other question in philosophy comes after this one, and that the rest is talk from people who have already decided it is worth going on waking up each day.

A counterintuitive fact comes next, and it is the axis of the chapter. Camus turns upside down the naive logic that whoever finds life meaningless kills themselves. Those who kill themselves, in most cases, were certain of life's meaning, and it is the ruin of that certainty that weighs, not its absence. Among those who denied meaning, almost none carried their own logic to the end. The exception is not a philosopher but a character: Kirillov, the engineer in Demons, by Dostoevsky. Camus needs a fiction to find someone consistent, because in real life nobody takes the denial of meaning to the end. People deny meaning and keep having lunch, loving, paying bills. He treats this as a fact, not as cowardice, and the whole book comes out of that fact: "We cultivate the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking." (chapter Absurdity and Suicide)

(If the question has stopped being a book question and has become yours, talk to someone you trust. In Brazil, CVV, 188, is available at any hour.)

2. The leap

Kierkegaard, Chestov, Jaspers, Husserl: they all saw the absurd with a lucidity Camus praises, and in the next moment they took a leap, recovering on the other side of the abyss something that solves the problem. He calls this philosophical suicide and warns that the name is not an insult: physical suicide and the leap each eliminate one of the two sides of the confrontation to end the tension. One kills the man, the other silences the world. The question that most disturbs people of faith is in Philosophical Suicide in Camus: What About Faith?.

3. Revolt

If the leap is out and suicide is out, what remains is revolt. Here revolt is neither protest nor revolution: it is the refusal to give up either side. It means living with full awareness of the absurd, with no hope of resolving it and without the resignation of pretending it does not exist. "One of the few coherent philosophical attitudes is revolt." (chapter Absurd Freedom)

4. What "Everything is permitted" does not mean

The most common misreading of the book goes like this: if there is no meaning, everything is permitted, so I do whatever I want. Camus shuts the door on anyone who tries it: "'Everything is permitted' does not mean that nothing is forbidden." (chapter The Absurd Man) There is also a consequence the summaries leave out: if all experiences are indifferent, the experience of duty is worth as much as any other. The full discussion is in Without God, Is Everything Permitted? Camus's Answer.

5. The descent

The chapter that gives the book its name shows Sisyphus pushing the stone and watching it roll back down. That is the image that stayed, but Camus does not look at the climb. He looks at the interval after it:

"I see this man going back down with heavy and measured steps toward the torment whose end he will never know. That hour, which is like a breath and which returns as surely as his misfortune, that hour is the hour of consciousness." (chapter The Myth of Sisyphus)

On the climb, the effort swallows everything. On the way down he is empty-handed and knows exactly what will happen again. That is why the tragedy is not in the punishment: "This myth is tragic only because its hero is conscious." (chapter The Myth of Sisyphus) Camus then swaps the myth for an ordinary man, the worker, whose destiny, he says, is tragic only in the rare moments when he becomes conscious. The chapter closes with a hard line: "His fate belongs to him. The rock is his home." That is not conformism, which would mean saying the stone is not so heavy.

The famous line, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy," is the last line of this chapter, and the discovery is not in it, it is in the line before. The full path is in One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy: The Full Sentence.

Where to start reading The Myth of Sisyphus

Start with the chapter that gives the book its name. It sits almost at the end and runs under ten pages. Read it first, even out of order: it is the only narrative part of the essay, and it delivers the image the rest of the book will justify. Then, and only then, go back to the first page.

What will stall you is the chapter "Philosophical Suicide," where Camus names thinkers he takes for granted you know. Don't stop to study each one. Keep a single key: they all saw the same abyss, and they all leapt to the other side. Camus refuses to leap.

Leave the appendix on Kafka for your second reading, because that is where most people give up. And it's worth reading in company. The difficulty often eases when the book is read in a group, because someone understands a sentence better and, sharing it, the text opens up for everyone. See also A Hard Book to Understand: When Discomfort Helps. The edition we recommend, the Brazilian edition by Record (quotations in our translation), is listed in the video description.

What the essay leaves open

Camus shuts the door on consolation and never proves in any line that it does not exist. He proves that he will not walk through it without being convinced, and that is something else. The question the video leaves is whether accepting the stone is the conquest of a lucid man or the greatest rationalization in the history of philosophy, a man calling his own prison freedom. Both sides can defend themselves with what the book contains. And there is a fact that is not in Camus: in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Sisyphus stops for a while, and the rest comes from outside. One Sisyphus is consoled, the other is lucid, and the video ends on that difference.

Continue: One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy: The Full Sentence · Philosophical Suicide in Camus: What About Faith? · What Was Sisyphus's Crime? The Man Who Cheated Death · In Turner's painting, the giant is barely there
Source lesson: O Mito de Sísifo, de Albert Camus