Images of the Absurd: Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus and The Outsider and Peter Abrahams’s Mine Boy

Abstract

In this article, I analyse Peter Abrahams’s Mine Boy. Apart from the fact that the novel has not received the critical attention it deserves despite its remarkable status as the first South African novel to address the plight of black South Africans, the negative criticisms that the novel has attracted are noteworthy. Moreover, the few who have attempted to analyse it have done so along the axis of either the rural-urban poetics or the liberal or Marxist ideals. How Albert Camus’s concept of the absurd figures in the novel has thereby been ignored. Drawing on this concept of the absurd as conceptualised and depicted in Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus and The Outsider, I argue that it is basically this concept that Abrahams employs in constituting his narrative. While not pushing the argument too far that Abrahams’s Mine Boy is an absurdist novel, I nevertheless demonstrate and conclude that it is simultaneously about the suffering and the heroism of black South African characters, which translates to them being the true image of the absurd.