SOURCE: McGregor, Rob Roy. “Camus's ‘The Silent Man’ and ‘The Guest’: Depictions of Absurd Awareness.” Studies in Short Fiction 34, no. 3 (summer 1997): 307-21.

In the following essay, McGregor argues that Camus's “The Silent Men” and “The Guest” can be regarded as “companion pieces that symbolically depict unawareness and awareness, respectively, of the distressing state of the absurd human condition as articulated in Le Mythe de Sisyphe.”

In Le Mythe de Sisyphe,¹ Camus commends the profundity of Kierkegaard's perception regarding despair: “[There is] nothing more profound than Kierkegaard's view that despair is not an act but a state: the very state of sin. For sin is what separates from God. The absurd is the metaphysical state of the conscious man. … Perhaps this notion will become clear if I hazard this outrageous remark: the absurd is sin without God” (127-28).²

Both Kierkegaard's and Camus's emphasis here, of course, is that despair...