The Heroes of Absurd - Essay Example

Absurdism, both in literature and in life, represents a constant struggle of meaning for the reader and the for it is non-conformist in its outlook and anti-rationalist in its theoretical underpinnings. Absurdity, according to Albert Camus, is not inherent to the world itself, or the individual human being, but in the tension created by their mutual indifference. Thus, the absurd moments in life occur in the recognition, or awareness, of one’s position in an indifferent world. The absurdist hero must recognize this indifference and the tension it creates; and yet, he thrives in this tension, and his sober appreciation for this torment becomes an absurd victory. In Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus, Sisyphus, condemned to roll a rock ceaselessly to the top of a mountain only to watch its descent back down, “concludes all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile” (Camus 121). With a recognition of the absurd a necessary condition of becoming the “absurd hero” for Camus, within the context of his short story “The Guest”, it seems rather clear his protagonists Daru and the Arab meet the condition for his absurd hero. Both characters are driven into a fearful isolation by the authorities neither of them wishes to accept, and therefore recognize the absurdity of whatever action they may take. Despite given ultimate freedom over their actions, the absurd heroes cannot use this freedom for any other action besides exile. “The Guest” seems to exemplify this species of absurdism, focusing on a question of free will. The story is one of a teacher named Daru living alone within the confines of a school high on a Saharan plateau. One day, a police officer who charges him with bringing an Arab prisoner to a European trial breaks his solitude. However, Daru declines to treat the man as a prisoner. Giving him money and food the next morning, Daru gives the Arab the choice between one path leading to prison and another path leading him to an Arab village. Given to “Choose”, the prisoner begins his journey to the police. Although Daru settles with his conscience the choice to give the Arab freedom, it is an absurd error insofar as it gives the Arab a reason to act with honor, and by that token embrace self-sacrifice. The motives of both Daru and the Arab are ambiguous, which is a convention within absurdist literature; but central to this lack of decisive an overarching motivations is the supreme freedom with which both characters act in this setting of extreme solitude. Accordingly, Camus creates an absurd hero narrative not based on set universal themes but with the freedom to live in the figurative and literal ruggedness of freedom and nature. As such, Camus becomes the storyteller Hannah Arendt refers to when she says the narratives of a storyteller “tell us more about their subjects, the ‘hero’ in the center of each story, than any product of human hands ever tells us about the master who produced it” (Arendt 184). The absurd heroes in the story, Daru and the Arab, like Sisyphus, face what is for Camus the “one truly serious philosophical problem”: that of suicide (Camus 3). For in a life in which the hero has rejected hope, embraced freedom, and recognizes the absurd, one is left with the question of why not suicide. Both Daru and the Arab face this philosophical problem at a number of points in the short story; for instance, the Arab chooses between the two paths, and Daru chooses between cooperating and disobeying the government. However, what makes these men heroes of the absurd remains imprecise for the most part. A hero is arguably a person that exemplifies or instantiates the values of a particular normative system. Normatively, absurdism puts value in living aware of his plight, acting in accordance with this freedom in our passion and our revolt (Lane). Thus, the absurd hero is the man who instantiates a life well-lived thriving in this kind of self-perceptive and other-perspective state. With respect to the world, the absurd hero is indifferent and, with respect to himself, the absurd hero is joyful and passionate. In “The Guest”, each of the two protagonists’ individual conditions and respective solitudes are gazed upon with a specialized intensity that neither man possesses independently. By intertwining the two men’s stories of ultimate freedom, Camus shows the existential immediacy of their becoming the absurd heroes of which Camus endeavors to paint a picture. Exile is a recurring theme throughout the story, not only in terms of geographical isolation, but also in terms of social exile from the colony culture from which he came. Daru expresses his voiceless protest to the violence of the brute immorality of the colonizers over the colonized by self-imposing isolation through a retreat to a sparsely populated and forgotten region of the desert. His hatred for the colonization of the land comes in the form of a moral disagreement with the infringement upon the rights and personal liberties of human beings. From this personal rule, Daru becomes sick at the thought both of delivering the prisoner to his sure execution, and the murder the Arab is guilty of committing. Daru allows the escape of the Arab to square with his own conscience, and his inability to live within the freedom-limiting institution under which he lives that endeavors to set examples of individuals in order to impose foreign cultural values. By doing so, Camus shows his audience that Daru is still cognizant of his reasoning for imposing self-exile—and at the same time that he is still cognizant of his own absurdity. Daru can only feel unfettered and free in this environment where there are no social or communal obligations to limit his or others’ freedom. He takes joy in the release of the prisoner, which is, in essence, an exercise in his inability to impose limits on the freedoms of another. A celebration of his own inability to perform an act is perhaps a true showing and hallmark of the absurd hero for Camus, who extols the value of “a privileged moment” (Camus 20). Like Daru, the Arab is exiled in the harsh physical and psychological realities of the desert, and even more so since committing the crime of murder within his native community. He lacks plentiful food, mobility, infrastructure, prosperity, and protection, all because of the nomadic lifestyle the people of this region must embrace in order to meet their necessities. In a land of drought and famine, the Arab belongs to a race of impoverished, rough-faced natives wandering in search of the resources to feed their children. The Arab’s murder, in fact, was committed in a dispute over rations from the French, upon whom entire communities depend for their survival. To this end, Camus describes the Arab’s eyes as feverish, his chest as muscled, and his conduct toward food primitive and animalistic. As such, the Arab is caught up in the political factors affecting the situation within his native community. In addition, by committing the murder over resources that are made available largely only by a controlling, external influence, the Arab is humiliated by being led like a slave on lands through which he and his relatives would roam with ultimate freedom as nomads. This symbol and microcosm of the political situation of the time further emphasizes the role of economic freedom not only on the level of the community, but on an individual level: where a murder is caused not by a personal human nature (in which the absurdist does not believe) but by the factors impinging on individual freedom that Daru, as an absurd hero, recognizes and consequently values. In terms of his psychological exile, the Arab prisoner divorces himself from his native society through his murder of a relative. Moreover, at the same time, he is an enemy of the French state, which finds the native community’s procedures for justice offensive and barbaric. Thus, Daru gives him the option of existential neutrality from the freedom-limiting nature of either party by means of a retreat to the south and the protection of nomads. However, the Arab chooses a trek that reflects his place within the boundaries set by his social obligations of his village. The nomads, in contrast, are characterized by infinite, ungrounded, aimless wandering—a kind of ultimate freedom. In contrast to Daru, the Arab’s life is structured not only around this local community, but also by the French colonial institutions that reign over his individual village. To forsake both the local and the colonial would be, for the Arab, both recognition of the absurd and, more significantly, a profound abandonment of his personal identity. This is why he protests such an exile: doing so would undermine any sense of his own self that remains within him. Therefore, although the Arab clearly recognizes his own freedom, he simultaneously recognizes the choices and obligations he is required to assume as the price of his freedom. Both Daru and his Arab guest are isolated and exiled from their own respective sets of social values and institutions at the secluded one-room schoolhouse in the desert. In their seclusion and opposition, their confrontation comes to the forefront, and each is revealed the other’s opposite. They are unable to develop a psychological connection because of their radically different contexts and social backgrounds. In many ways, however, both are isolated because of an internal, subconscious need for the consistency of their existence: Daru in terms of his principle of non-aggression, and the Arab in terms of his physical life faced with food shortages in his native lands. Brought together by infringements upon their personal liberties, the two men nevertheless develop a mutual intensity, an existential tension, despite attempts to establish a communication to lessen that intensity. This intensity stems from the inability of either man to impose upon the other and thus form a sturdy connection. Daru, as an existential or absurd hero, resents the external control forces imposing upon his life, including friendships with men like Balducci and political obligations, and, according to this principle, refuses to impose upon the liberties of other human beings. Ultimately alone with his decisions, Daru is faced with the reality of having to make a decision: what to do with the prisoner. In the end, he places the burden of that decision back upon the Arab prisoner, who decides to accept the fate of death, which Camus recognizes awaits us all (Lane). In a narrative reflecting the values of the absurd, it seems by restoring free will to the Arab guest, Daru has done more to help him than his native community has. Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Camus, Albert. The Guest. Ed. Justin OBrien. n.d. . —. The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays. New York: Vintage, 1991. Lane, Bob. The Absurd Hero. 1996. . Read More