Camus’s opening gains force when you follow what he is asking and what he still has to establish. This guide pairs the first pages of The Myth of Sisyphus with his later preface, so that a striking sentence becomes the beginning of a reading.
Begin with a defined stretch of text
Use the publisher’s Look Inside sample of the second Vintage International edition (November 2018), translated from French by Justin O’Brien. The passages considered here are the preliminary note, the opening of “Absurdity and Suicide” (pp. 3–5), and the preface signed in Paris in March 1955.
Keep those three locations separate in your notes. The preface looks back on the book; the opening chapter begins its inquiry. Reading them together lets you distinguish an author’s account of his destination from the steps by which he asks a reader to reach it.
What makes the opening question urgent?
one must first answer
On page 3, Camus gives priority to the question of whether life is worth living. His reason is the relation between thought and consequential action. The examples that follow test how strongly people’s conduct bears out what they say they believe. Read this as an argument for where philosophy should begin.
Ask two different questions of that opening: Why this question first? and What answer will the essay defend? A passage can establish urgency while leaving its answer to be developed. Marking those tasks separately keeps the opening’s dramatic force from doing the work of a conclusion.
as a starting-point
The preliminary note explicitly gives the absurd the position of a beginning. That is a useful instruction for reading: record the condition from which the inquiry proceeds, then look for the consequences Camus draws. The note also describes the inquiry as provisional. Its vocabulary asks you to follow a process.
A margin-note method
Beside each paragraph, write one verb: asks, defines, illustrates, qualifies or concludes. Add a few words saying what it asks or qualifies. If two adjacent paragraphs receive the same label, check whether the second adds evidence, changes the scale or challenges the first.
Read the preface as a statement of direction
a lucid invitation to live and to create
In the March 1955 preface, Camus states that the book’s answer rejects suicide and describes the possibility of moving beyond nihilism from within its limits. His final description of living and creating gives the opening question a clear retrospective frame.
The interpretive task is to hold both moments together: the severe question and this stated direction. For a fuller reading, follow the intervening essay before assessing how persuasively it connects them. The short sample establishes the contrast; it supplies only the beginning of the extended reasoning.
Make a quotation travel with its argument
- Locate it. Record chapter or preliminary section, page, translator and edition.
- Describe its job. Write a sentence beginning “Here Camus is asking…” or “Here the preface states…”
- Keep one qualification. Note a nearby limit on the claim or a question the paragraph leaves open.
- Test your account. Return to the passage and identify the particular words that support your description.
A useful reading note might say: The chapter establishes the priority of a question; the later preface names the answer the book aims to defend. That is Yenra’s summary of their relationship. When comparing translations, put the corresponding passages side by side and discuss a specific word choice before claiming a difference in philosophy.
Continue with Matthew Arnold’s changing turns of thought to compare how a poem can move through uncertainty, or Todorov’s distinction between a work and its structure for another way to identify what a critical argument is doing.
About these selections
Source notes identify the wording and edition used. Interpretations and exercises are Yenra’s. Follow the linked text when citing or comparing a passage.