Abstract
ALBERT CAMUS' EXPRESSION of "tragedy in modem dress" portrays men struggling with the emotional and psychological facts of alienation by means of man-made justice. Caligula (from the play of the same name, written in 1938, first performed in 1945), apprehending the alienation inherent in the human condition, exercises absolute power to match the absurdity of the world, inevitably to find the same terrible face of self-separation in his own mirror.1 Martha, Jan, and their mother, in Le Malentendu (1944), murder and misunderstand in a search for self-definition under "the injustice of sky and climate." The Plague divides the men and women of L'Etat de siege ( 1948) from their own dignity and, in the end, from their lives, by exercising a justice as logical and inhuman as Caligula's; and the terrorists of Les ]ustes (1949) attempt to redeem the myth of absolute justice with their lives, sacrificing the relative truths which alone are available to man. Those who seek self-identity fail to recognize the futility of such a task in an absurd universe. Those who deal in justice misunderstand the "pathos of distance" between mankind and the good.
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