Albert Camus: The Myth Of Sisyphus And The Modernist Man

Abstract

Why do some people choose death over a life that has lost its meaning? Albert Camus opens The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) with this question, calling suicide the one truly serious philosophical problem. This article critically examines the book as a founding text of modernism, one that places the individual, not God, tradition, or ideology, at the center of meaning-making. It explains how the absurd arises when our longing for order and purpose meets a world that offers none. article looks at Camus’s distinction between “triumphant” and “humiliated” reason, and at what he calls philosophical suicide: the quiet surrender of independent thought to religion, ideology, or the comfort of routine. Against this evasion, the article traces the portrait of the absurd man, defined by revolt, freedom, and passion, who lives without false hope and accepts contradiction as the condition of a full life. The figure of Sisyphus, pushing his stone up the hill again and again, becomes the emblem of modern humanity. His labor echoes the endless cycle of the modern working week, yet by accepting it with open eyes he turns a punishment into a meaning of his own making. this article introduces Urdu readers to Camus’s defiance, responsibility, and living fully in the present.