398 Words
Willy Gunawan
12IB/NRP
Some ESL Assignment –weird one--
The Life and Times of Albert Camus
What are the foundations of the ideology of Albert Camus?
1000 Words
A French novelist, journalist and playwright, Albert Camus famous for developing the theme of “the absurd” in his work. “The absurd” is an idea about how people live their lives. On the one hand, people want to live in a world that is happy, just, safe and understandable. But the actual world is filled with pain, suffering, injustice and chaos that is often created by people and it often ends in meaningless death. Camus did not believe that people had to simply accept “the absurd” in life. Instead he wrote about how people could revolt against the absurd by practicing humane values in their everyday lives.
Albert Camus was born in 1913 in Algiers, a North African country. At the time, Algiers was part of France, making Camus and his family French citizens. Camus lost his father to world war one when he is one year old. Raised by his mother alone, Camus lived in poverty as a child and managed to complete his education with the generous aid of scholarships. When he reached the university, Albert Camus showed great talent as a philosopher and writer. He also started a drama company, wrote plays and acted in them.
As a young man, Camus contracted tuberculosis, which prevented him from teaching. As a result, he started on a career as a journalist and writer in 1938, just as the Nazi regime was rising to power in Germany. As war broke out in Europe a year later in 1939, Camus moved to Paris and completed his first novel, The Stranger. The Stranger is about a young clerk named Mersault who is a “stranger” to most normal human reactions to life. Mersault shows no feeling and at the height of the novel, kills an Arab without even knowing why. In his trial, he openly talks about the killing and admits his guilt. The book is all about “the absurd” nature of this man’s life.
When the Nazis occupied France, Camus was forced to flee to Algeria in 1941. A year later, he returned to Paris to join the French Resistance against the Nazis and worked as an underground journalist. He was the editor of the Resistance newspaper Combat for three years. To be certain, Camus’ experience of the war and first-hand witnessing of the cruelty inflicted upon innocent people by the Nazi Party clearly influenced his work and belief in the true absurdity of human evil. Out of his first hand experience of Nazism cruelty and suppression, Camus developed his second novel, The Plague, which is a fictional account of a deadly plague. Taking up the issues of meaningless death in this novel, Camus also strongly emphasized the need for humans to fight against it. Overall, the novel is an allegory of the German occupation of France, as well as symbolic of a general fight of humankind against evil, suffering and death.
In 1957, Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature. This award is the highest honor in the world that an individual can achieve for writing. Still a young man at this time, Camus continued to work on writing short stories and novels and was to become the director of the Paris Theater when he was tragically killed in an automobile accident in 1960. Camus was only 46 at the time of his death. This tragedy was a great loss to literature.
Aside from writing up the novel and books, Camus is a well-known philosopher. As a philosopher, Camus shows a great focus on life and death, happiness and freedom.
There are some words that I have never really understood, such as sin...For if there is sin against life, it lies perhaps less in despairing of it than in hoping for another life and evading the implacable grandeur of the one we have.
The quote presented is an example of Camus’ thought about a way of life, and justification of death and suicide. Camus’ has experienced death first hand, having TBC means knowing that he will die slowly, painfully. It is very likely that Camus start thinking about the real meaning of life, and justification of suicide. His of course influenced Albert Camus approaches and trial on solving the most puzzling things such as happiness and death is mainly due to the fact that he is privileged to be near death his whole life.
His beliefs and approach on life, is known in modern term as “Existentialism”. It is a belief without God, a belief in which humans are blamed for responsibility for consequences that comes. Camus has clearly been undermined with this way of thinking; he has never blamed anyone for anything but to accept situations. In all of his novel it is shown that many suppression received by minority groups, should be fought and that people do not have the need to lead a common life in absurdity but can be liberated and gain freedom. All in the name of one’s action and effort put into it.
Terms & Glossary (In Order of Appearance)
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Philosophy - Investigation of the nature, causes, or principles of reality, knowledge, or values, based on logical reasoning.
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Morphine - extracted from opium, a powerful, habit-forming narcotic used to relieve pain.
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Addict - A person that is bonded into the need of a certain substance.
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Allegory - A story, picture, or play that represent something else/ has another meaning.
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Colonialism - exploitation by a stronger country of weaker one; the use of the weaker country's resources to strengthen and enrich the stronger country
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Nobel Prize - an annual award for outstanding contributions to chemistry or physics or physiology and medicine or literature or economics or peace.
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Ideology - A set of beliefs that form the basis of a way of thinking.