In The Myth of Sisyphus,… Camus provided us with a precise commentary upon [The Stranger]. His hero was neither good nor bad, neither moral nor immoral. These categories do not apply to him. He belongs to a very particular species for which the author reserves the word "absurd." But in Camus's work this word takes on two very different meanings. The absurd is both a state of fact and the lucid awareness which certain people acquire of this state of fact. The "absurd"...

The movement … from unconsciousness to consciousness and despair and back to unconsciousness, has been analysed by Albert Camus in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus. (pp. 278-79) Camus' essay deals exclusively with … the question of one's response to the awareness that life has no transcendent meaning. The essay "attempts to resolve the problem of suicide … without the aid of eternal values which, temporarily perhaps, are absent or distorted in contemporary Europe.�...