Camus’s absurdist trilogy emerged directly from pre-war Paris alienation

Evidence

The journalist and short-story writer Albert Camus, who had come to the city from his home in Algeria, holed himself up in a room and listened to the street sounds outside his window, wondering why he was there. ‘Foreign, admit that I find everything strange and foreign’, he wrote in his notebook in March 1940. ‘No future’, he added in an undated note. Yet he did not let this mood stop him from working on literary projects: a novel, L’étranger (The Stranger or The Outsider), a long essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, and a play, Caligula. He called these his ‘three absurds’, because they all dealt with the meaninglessness or absurdity of human existence, a theme that seemed to come naturally during this time. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 452

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s own work on existentialism orientation — this is the origin story of the absurdism pillar alongside Sartre’s phenomenology. — connects to: Camus’s absurdist themes grew out of his colonial and impoverished childhood — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 479; Camus’s affectless protagonist mirrored both his own trauma and wartime France’s suppressed surface — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 482
• DEFINE: Defines what Camus meant by his ‘three absurds’ — the novel, essay, and play that gave absurdism its canonical texts.

Broader Connections

• Camus’s absurdist themes grew out of his colonial and impoverished childhood #complicates (0.78) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 479
• Camus’s affectless protagonist mirrored both his own trauma and wartime France’s suppressed surface #expands (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 482