Albert Camus: Summer in Algiers Essay -- Literature Papers

Albert Camus Summer in AlgiersThis early seek by Albert Camus presents an silvern picture of his understanding of what it heart and soul to know. But in order for us to assimilate it, we must recognize that Camus is not celebrating a hedonic naturalism, nor pleasing in an existential anti- expertism. Rather, his articulation of lucidity and the exemplification of it in the artistic creation of the essay itself presents us with a challenging concept of knowledge. I attack to explicate this concept with the help of two figs, one from the musical bull and one from the movie The Pawnbroker, thus seeking to reinforce Camus reliance upon image as the equivalent of idea.This is a paper about Albert Camus understanding of what it means to know as he eloquently expressed it in the essay Summer in Algiers. To begin it requires two images. First I go up a song from the musical Hair. One of the hippie freaks sings that he is cracked for the red, white and blue. He castigates his bourge ois detractors for thinking him subversive just because he has long hair. He continues to express devotion to the red, white and blue until, at the end of the song, he adds crazy for the red, white and blue . . . and yellow and green. alone then do we realize that he has been singing about his cognize of color, not of the American flag. The second image is no joke. It is the image of magnetic pole Steiger playing the lead part in The Pawnbroker, the excellent movie adaptation of Edward Wallants novel. Near the end of the movie, when the old pawnbroker realizes that he has been wrong to isolate himself in bitterness from the hu gentlemans gentleman emotions of life by brooding on a past ruined by the Nazi Holocaust, he places his hand on the point of the receipt nail in hi... ...und, tightly mouthing a cigarette, time lag stoically for the next disappointment. Still, there is no contradiction. We need only bring forward that the nature Camus celebrated was always cruel. Strang e country that gives the man it nourishes both(prenominal) his splendor and his misery (p. 141) We need only remember that purity was an intellectual virtue for this shining exemplar of the life of the mind.The life of a man is fulfilled without the aid of his mind, with its backward and forward movements, at one and the equivalent time its solitude and its presences. To see these men of Belcourt working, protecting their wives and children, and often without a reproach, I think one can feel a unfathomed shame. To be sure, I dedicate no illusions about it. There is not much love in the lives I am speaking of. I ought to say that not much remains. But at least they have evaded nothing. (p. 153)