Neither for Sartre nor Camus is unbelief the cause of despair …; it is rather the starting point toward the only meaningful response to the wretched condition of man and the denial of human values—namely, revolt…. [This is the premise of] Sartre's dramatic explorations of the estate of man. "Existentialism," says Sartre, "is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position."… Both writers in their contexts mean to be optimistic in that they reject passive suffering and resignation to a higher will. But at the same time, giving to man the power to scorn, to appropriate, and even to shape his fate, they set the stage for their tragic parables adapted from myth, history, and politics. In these, man goes under because he deceives himself as to the nature of an alien universe in which he counts for nothing. His alternative is to create an intelligible world centered in himself through a free act of commitment, assuming the burden of guilt implicit in any choice or action.
Despite the obvious fundamental differences among them, there are certain motives common to the so-called existential theater, the Christian drama, and the late plays of Ibsen. The bid for freedom, deliverance from a state of captivity or paralysis, the desire to liberate and thereby define the self by means of an act of the will—the lines of the drama converge on this central moment in all three theaters. But if such motives and type actions are comparable, the concepts behind them are not. The human will in each instance is guided by a different ethic…. The existential protagonist starts … from a forlorn condition. Without hope (which is, however, not to be confused with Christian despair), acknowledging and yet resisting death and the absurdity of life, he proceeds from that awareness to the freedom of being able continuously to shape his existence by choosing to act. In the theater of his world he is indeed the "first actor" or protagonist, the sole judge and spectator. (pp. 262-63)
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