Abstract
Among the various existentialist philosophers adduced to illuminate Hemingway's ethic and metaphysic, the Camus of The Myth of Sisyphus is uniquely apropos. Camus analyzes the heroic but doomed struggle against cosmic absurdity with a physical and emotional immediacy and a starkly lucid perspective on the value problems that this struggle entails. His analysis bears directly on The Old Man and the Sea , where—in essence—Santiago must battle both physically and mentally against the nihil and its ultimate negation of human enterprises. This existentialist grid makes it possible to view the novel's Christian symbolism as an ironic foil for an earth-bound metaphysic of perpetual and courageous rebellion without hope of transcendence.
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