Between the propensity
to search for meaning in existence and the fundamental impossibility to do
arises the philosophical notion of the Absurd.
Both Camus’ The Plague and Bioshock, developed by 2K Boston,
strongly incorporate the Absurdist notion into their respective narratives,
specifically regarding how people react when challenged with the notion of the
Absurd. These narratives showcase an isolated populace being violently
confronted with death, while being both unable neither to combat it nor find
any solace behind it. These conditions play out to become a perfect environment
in understanding the Absurd in The
Plague’s case, within the citizens of Oran and you the reader, and in Bioshock’s case, within the citizens of
Rapture and you the player.
To understand
the Absurd in both The Plague and Bioshock, one has to analyze Camus’
personal theory of the Absurd. “In
Camus’s view, neither human existence nor the world are themselves absurd.
Instead the absurd arises because the world is resistant to this kind of
intelligibility: ‘we want the world to make sense, but it does not make sense.
To see this conflict is to see the absurd’ … What normally brings the individual
into confrontation with his absurd condition, suggests Camus, is the awareness
not of human mortality per se, but of his own personal mortality” (Foley 6).
This train of thought is blatantly evident in The Plague as well as Camus’ essay which deals more directly with
the Absurd and fully shapes an all-encompassing framework of Absurdist theory: The Myth of Sisyphus. In his essay,
Camus clearly outlines his view of the Absurd comparatively against other
philosophers’ designs and outlining ways of coping with this notion after
acceptance. Camus writes in The Myth of
Sisyphus “In this particular case and on the plane of intelligence, I can
therefore say that the Absurd is not in man (if such a metaphor could have a
meaning) nor in the world, but in their presence together. For the moment it is
the only bond uniting them” (30). He then goes on to say “To destroy one of its
terms is to destroy the whole. There can be no absurd outside the human mind.
Thus, like everything else, the absurd ends with death. But there can be no
absurd outside this world either” (30-31). This illustrates on of the key
constructs of the Absurd, in that it arises from people and their experience in
this world, or the human condition. More fundamentally, Camus believes that the
absurd arises from the contrast of two ideals: “I am thus justified in saying
that the feeling of absurdity does not spring from the mere scrutiny of a fact
or an impression, but that it bursts from the comparison between a bare face
and a certain reality, between an action and the world that transcends it. The
absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared;
it is born of their confrontation” (Myth
of Sisyphus 30). In this case, the incongruent elements being the innate
human process of searching for meaning and lucidity and the unforgiving,
taciturn space that is reality, a space where it is impossible to find
significance in life. After coming to terms with this, Camus identifies the
three ways in which a person can approach the absurdity of life. “Thus I draw
from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my
passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life
what was an invitation to death” (Myth of
Sisyphus 64). Sequentially, these terms represent much larger issues which
Camus then attends to in Sisyphus.
Revolt is a reference for the extradition of the concept of suicide due to the
realization of the absurd human condition. After refusing to just end one’s
life because life is absurd, religion is often turned to. Camus’ “freedom” is
the refusal to be constricted by religion and similar devices constructed to
blind or shelter oneself to the Absurd. Finally, passion refers to the
concluding chain in mental acceptance of the Absurd after rejection of hope;
that one must exist in spite of the Absurd and only after this acceptance can life
truly be lived wholly and appreciated. This view is categorically embodied
within Sisyphus, Camus’ “Absurd Hero”, as seen in last two sentences of The Myth of Sisyphus: “The struggle
itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine
Sisyphus happy” (123).
Once
understanding Camus’ view of the Absurd as seen in The Myth of Sisyphus, it can be directly and absolutely applied to
the narrative, as I will argue, of Bioshock.
However, I choose to compare the game not to The Myth of Sisyphus directly, but instead compare it to Camus’
1947 The Plague as it’s narrative
structure set a more easily compared standard by which to compare the narrative
structure of Bioshock. Through
medium entrenched experience as well as meta-experience, both of these
narratives attempt to inform the audience of the Absurd as well as attempt to
convey the Absurd in an immediate way, allowing the viewer to realize it
firsthand.
To understand
the relation of the Absurd to the forms of media I previously mentioned, The Plague and Bioshock, one first has to be closely familiar with the storyline
of both. As such, I will provide a brief yet thorough description of both in
the following sections. The Plague
is, on the surface, a novel that follows the experiences of a handful of
citizens of the Algerian city Oran during an outbreak of Plague in the 1940’s.
However, looking past the bare skeleton of the novel, one can certainly realize
the deep implication of the Absurd in the story. Camus breaks the novel into
five different sections, each corresponding to a certain state of the plague
epidemic. The novel begins with an unknown narrator describing the thousands of
rats coming out to die on the streets of the city. Following this, it shifts to
Dr. Rieux beginning to notice strange feverish cases within the populace of
Oran. Within the first chapter the reader discovers Rieux’s wife being sent
away to a hospital out of town due to a non-plague related illness, and is
introduced to Dr. Rieux’s good friend, Grand, a city clerk. Shortly afterward,
Rieux meets up with Jean Tarrou, a stranger who had only arrived in Oran a few
weeks prior. In the building where Grand resides, another character is
introduced, Cottard, in the manner that Grand had burst into his room when he
was attempting to hang himself. In this first section, the reader is also
introduced to many other characters, the most notable of which is Rambert, a
journalist who is only supposed to be Rapture for a short time researching a
story about the poorer living quarters in the city. After this introductory
period, Rieux comes to the conclusion that these feverish cases are an outbreak
of plague and after discussing this with the town Prefect, the city is sealed.
Part II then begins and is mostly concerned with the citizens of Oran learning
to accept and cope with the plague in their midst. A preacher, Paneloux,
delivers a sermon stressing that the plague is sent from God and that the
citizens should turn to God as to repent. As the death toll rises, Tarrou
suggests that Rieux and other characters form sanitary group that serves those
afflicted with plague, both in their own homes and in the makeshift hospitals
set up around the city. Rambert concocts a plan to escape the city for his love
interest by meeting with people involved with smuggling with the help of
Cottard, who is now profiting off the plague by selling cheap smuggled liquor
and tobacco at inflated prices. After the meaty Part II, Part III is just a
reiteration of the devolving nature of the townspeople coupled with the
evolving nature of the plague. However, the description of funerals at this
point I found to be perhaps the most graphic account of the horrors during a
plague state: “The corpses were tipped pell-mell into the pits and had hardly
settled into place when spadefuls of quicklime began to sear their faces and
the earth covered them indistinctively, in holes dug steadily deeper as time
went on” (Plague 161). Part IV
continues the trend of plague in the town, with the death rate remaining at a
constant. Rieux and Tarrou attend the performance Orpheus put on by a passing operatic group that had been stranded
in Oran, however it ends with the lead character collapsing on stage due to
plague. Another minor character’s son contracts the plague, and Rieux, Tarrou,
and Paneloux try to save him with a new batch of plague serum, but
unfortunately it does not perform well and the child dies an excruciating
death. Soon after this, Paneloux dies from an unknown illness. Also, in this
section Rambert finally gets a chance to escape the city, but eventually
chooses to stay and combat the illness with the sanitary squad. The final part
is concerned with the decline of plague in Oran, but not without grief. Rieux
learns his wife has died, and after the apparent end of plague in full, Tarrou
contracts it and dies. The end of the novel comes with Rieux revealing he was
the narrator and decided to transcribe these events under the conclusion he
came to that there is more to admire in the people of Oran than to despise.
Bioshock follows a similar narrative
structure to The Plague, but differs
in several essential ways. The Player begins the story as a man named Jack (the
name Jack I will use interchangeably with the term “Player” to emphasize the
fact that during the gameplay of Bioshock,
one ultimately assumes his persona and circumstances) crashing into the
ocean as a plane passenger and subsequently swimming to a nearby tower
surfacing in the ocean. On arriving to the tower, the player enters a
bathysphere which takes him or her to the underwater city of Rapture. Upon
arriving, the player is contacted via radio by an unknown person named Atlas
who leads the player away from his or her first encounter with splicers. The
world of Rapture is almost entirely populated with splicers, all looking out
for themselves, inhabiting a closed world. Shortly afterwards the player
encounters a large man in a diving suit whom Atlas refers to as a big daddy,
and who is accompanied by a small girl
with a needle who is likewise referred to as a little sister. After killing the
big daddy, Atlas urges Jack to kill the little sister, but another unknown
person named Tenenbaum contacts the player and urges them to save the girl
instead. Much of the rest of the game is concerned with traversing through
Rapture confronting various splicers, big daddies, little sisters and meeting
with non-splicer citizens of Rapture who ultimately lead you to Ryan’s office.
Upon meeting Ryan, Jack is informed of his situation, which I discuss in more
detail later. After being confronted with this revelation, the main purpose of
the player shifts from killing Ryan to confronting Atlas, thereby revealed to
be a notorious smuggler Frank Fontaine. Subsequently Tenenbaum attempts to
assist Jack in his goal, and the game ultimately ends with the death of
Fontaine at the players hands. The final cutscene in the game varies depending on the manner in
which the player chooses to handle the little sisters in the game. This dynamic
is significant to developing an element of suggested choice for the player in
the game. Whereas the game narrative can be seen as a straightforward
progression of story, the choices the player makes significantly affect the outcome
of the ending. As much as the endings differ, there are only three different
end scenes preprogrammed into the game. The element of choice is suggested, but
in fact there only three options, mirroring the three “consequences” that Camus
outlines in The Myth of Sisyphus.
However, for the purposes of this critical comparison I later refer to the
ending wherein the lives of all little sisters in the game are spared.
To begin the comparison of these
mediums, the setting of both Bioshock as
well as The Plague is crucial to
their narrative and spatial development, in addition to providing a perfect
backdrop for fostering of Absurdist realization. The city of Rapture, a once
great marvel of humanity and willpower, is reduced to a rapidly deteriorating
massive system of sealed architecture littered with forgotten statues of Andrew
Ryan coupled with rotting corpses. The entire city seems to reek of an air of
terror and discontent, propagated by the dog-eat-dog social system among the
splicers experienced by the player while traversing through the city. This
societal scheme portrayed in Bioshock
and that of The Plague, albeit
harshly different at first glance, can be easily correlated by the actions of
their respective inhabitants. The splicers of Bioshock can be viewed as only accommodating a preexisting societal
structure that they believe they have no recourse in changing. Merton describes
this complication with regards to the Abstract in reference to the populace in The Plague, but can easily be read in
terms of Rapture’s societal construction: “The mode of conduct that is extolled
as “right” is in fact a covert justification for cruelty, lying, killing – for
all the evil and injustice upon which society itself actually rests. … As long
as one is content to justify one’s existence by reference to these
automatically accepted norms, one is in complicity with the absurd, with a
murderous society, with death, with “the Plague.” (22). Oran in The Plague is set up as a similar
infrastructure to Rapture, “The silent city was no more than an assemblage of
huge, inert cubes, between which only the mute effigies of great men, carapaced
in bronze, which their blank stone or metal faces, conjured up a sorry
semblance of what the man had been. In lifeless squares and avenues these
tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have
personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect,
that of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively
silenced every voice” (Plague 156).
There is no doubt that a parallel could be drawn between the two cities by
their bleak visage alone coupled with the massive death count in both cases.
Rieux, in The Plague writes an account
of what would happen if the death rate rises any higher, but which seems as
much an account of the events befalling of Rapture: “That men would die in
heaps, and corpses rot in the street, whatever the authorities might do, and
the town would see in public squares the dying embrace the living in the
frenzies of an all too comprehensible hatred or some crazy hope” (Plague 162). But many other comparisons
exist, not in the least that of the ocean. Oran, being a port city, draws its
entire livelihood from the Mediterranean Sea, and with the walls of the city
being closed, the ocean becomes a representation of that which has left the
citizens of Oran and that which they cannot reach. Kellman writes in The Plague: Fiction and Resistance, “The
sea, present or absent, is a crucial image in The Plague, and … neatly mirror the despondency and then burgeoning
hope of the people of Oran. … The fact that littoral Oran lies with its back to
the sea and, for most of The Plague,
is denied any access at all to the harbor tantalizes with the thwarted hope of
salvation” (54-55). A similar effect is garnered in Bioshock. The separate sections of the city are connected through
glass tubes through which the player must traverse in order to reach the next
objective. These small respites, where the player is offered a chance to look
out into the ocean and presumably the surface, offer the same tantalization as
seen in The Plague.
Both The Plague and Bioshock can
be easily justified as becoming vessels of the Absurd in their own narrative
progression and structure. Camus’ begins
The Plague by offering a less than flattering description of the city at
the beginning of the second paragraph: “The town itself, let us admit, is ugly.
It has a smug, placid air and you need time to discover what it is that makes
it different from so many business centers in other parts of the world. How to
conjure up a picture, for instance, of a town without pigeons, without any
trees or gardens, where you never hear the beat of wings or the rustle of leaves
– a thoroughly negative place, in short” (3). This echoes the environment one
experiences after first arriving in Rapture; a stolid, nature less manmade city
under the ocean, a city devoid of all organic life save for the human citizens
and a handful of dead cats. At the absolute onset of arriving in Rapture, the
player arrives at a giant statue of Andrew Ryan situated behind a banner
displaying the slogan “No Gods or Kings. Only Man.” This statement, as much as
it smacks of objective Existentialism, also definitely reiterates Camus’
consequences he concludes from his analysis of confronting the absurd: revolt,
freedom, and passion. The freedom that Camus describes as a rejection of
Religion and other moral constructs erected as an alternative to suicide after
realization of the absurd human condition is undeniably seen in “No Gods or
Kings.” “Only Man” poses a different problem however, as it can be seen in the
guise of the digital populace inhabiting Rapture as well as the player playing
the game, unlike Rapture’s citizens, free of the hierarchical structure of game
design. Regardless of this qualification, “Only Man” can be viewed as a
representation of Camus’ “passion” in that only through the relinquishment of
the drive to justify one’s existence through external methods and principles
can one truly begin to live in a meaningful existence. Maurice Cranston
conscribes a quote by Camus in his article “Albert Camus”: “I continue to
believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in
it has meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on
having one” (48). After arriving in the actual city of Rapture, as you wait in
the entrance, one is confronted with a horrifying scene of murder as I man
struggles to get help and is attacked by a splicer is being plastered by shadow
on the wall opposite the bathysphere (submarine) that transports the player to
Rapture. Just as this foreshadows the vile events you will later witness and
experience in Rapture, a shockingly similar scene is described at the
commencement of Part I of The Plague:
“That evening, when Dr. Rieux was standing in the entrance, feeling for the
latch-key in his pocket before starting up the stairs to his apartment, he saw
a big rat coming toward him from the dark end of the passage. It moved
uncertainly, and its fur was sopping wet. The animal stopped and seemed to be
trying to get its balance, moved forward again toward the doctor, halted again,
then spun round on itself with a little squeal and fell on its side. Its mouth
was slightly open and blood was spurting from it” (8). Of course this is the
harbinger of Bubonic plague and forecasts the events to come in Plague, just as
the violent death in Bioshock. However,
both of these ghoulish scenes attempt to convey a deeper truth pertaining to the
human condition, and more topically, the Absurd. Thomas Merton gives an exact
rendering of how this relates to both human nature and Absurdist philosophy in
a commentary of The Plague, which I
believe can be just as easily reassigned to Bioshock:
“For Camus, this ‘death dance,’ this hidden propensity to pestilence, is
something more than mere mortality. It is the willful negation of life that is
built into life itself: the human instinct to dominate and to destroy – to seek
one’s own happiness by destroying the happiness of others, to build one’s
security on power and, by extension, to justify evil use of that power in terms
of ‘history,’ or of ‘the common good,’ or of ‘the revolution,’ or even of the
‘justice of God.’” He then continues, “Man’s drive to destroy, to kill or
simply to dominate and to oppress comes from the metaphysical void he
experiences when he finds himself a stranger in his own universe. He seeks to
make that universe familiar to himself by using it for his own ends, but his
own ends are capricious and ambivalent. They may be life-affirming, they may be
expressions and of love, or they may be life-denying, armored in legalism and
false theology, or perhaps even speaking the naked language of brute power”
(Merton 4-5). This statement completely qualifies the assessment of both the
citizens of Oran as well as Rapture. These people, when faced with environs
that undoubtedly force them violently to confront and accept the Absurd, can no
longer live in systematic existence, and instead respond in abstractions with
both positive and negative implications. The citizens of Oran that the story
revolves around react to the plague by attempting to medically combat the
epidemic despite their undeniably futile efforts. The citizens of Rapture,
splicers, take the route of Merton’s life-denying “naked language of brute
power” devolving Rapture into nothing more than a virtual representation of
Hobbes’ state of nature, where one can do anything to preserve one’s own life,
provided it possible in the limits of the law of nature. The splicers only
embody the lower tier of social hierarchy in Rapture, but even those in
control, Frank Fontaine and Andrew Ryan are not free from the bounds of this
fundamental Absurdist truth.
The human instinct to dominate and to
destroy is seen clearly embodied in the character of Andrew Ryan, the supreme
dominator, founder and monarch of Rapture. Throughout the vast majority of the
game the player, in the role of Jack, is fighting against Ryan, whose sole
drive seems to be an “I will dominate you and the entire city.” To parallel
Merton’s quote, Ryan’s drive to dominate stems from the profound conflict
between his massive megalomaniacal enterprise for meaning and his eventual
realization that this meaning is simply not impossible. “He seeks to make that
[impossible] universe familiar to himself by using it for his own ends, but his
own ends are capricious and ambivalent.” When Ryan is finally confronted and
commits suicide via the Jack’s actions, it is painfully obvious that he
succumbs to Camus’ consequence of revolt. After searching for meaning in
existence, and finding none, Ryan is presented with two options, acceptance and
denial. The act of elusion of acceptance by turning to a higher power is
obviously not in Ryan’s philosophy (exemplified by the banner that reads No
Gods or Kings) therefore acceptance is the only option. Hence, the easiest way
of dealing with the Absurd, as Camus has previously stated, is the simple act
of suicide, the acceptance that life is just not worth living, that life is
just too much. Camus writes in The Myth
of Sisyphus, “This is where it is seen to what a degree absurd experience
is remote from suicide. It may be thought that suicide follows revolt – but
wrongly. For it does not represent the logical outcome of revolt. It is just
the contrary by the consent it presupposes. Suicide, like the leap [of faith],
is acceptance at its extreme” (54). Not only does Ryan take this way out of the
Absurd, but decides to use it as one last opportunity to enlighten Jack, and
the player to their unwitting situation. To quote Bioshock, as the player confronts Ryan for the first and final time
he begins, “The assassin has overcome my final line of defense, and now
he plans to murder me. In the end what separates a man from a slave? Money?
Power? No, a man chooses, and a slave obeys!” Ryan delivers a small monologue
regarding the phrase “Would you kindly?” and its enslaving effect on Jack, and
finally commits assisted suicide by handing the player his golf club and
stating “Was a man sent to kill, or a slave?” His last words are a repetition
of the phrase “A man chooses; a slave obeys.” This overexpressed recurrence of
the parallel between the player and a slave only serves to strengthen the
resolve of Absurdist revelation in the player. An undeniably uncanny
resemblance can be found in Camus’ own observations on the state of absurdity
which I found vital in understanding the Absurd in relation to this specific
section of Bioshock: “But at that
moment I am well aware that that higher liberty, that freedom to be, which alone can serve as a basis
for a truth, does not exist. Death is there as the only reality. After death
the chips are down. I am not even free, either, to perpetuate myself, but a
slave, and, above all, a slave without hope of an eternal revolution, without
recourse to contempt. And who without revolution and without contempt can
remain a slave?” (Sisyphus 57). Of
course, the rest of the game is spent attempting to do just that, to revolt
from slavery. However, just as Camus discusses, this is never really possible,
even in the context of the game narrative. Once killing Ryan, the player
attempts to rid his or her self of Fontaine’s slavery, but in doing so
willingly becomes a slave to Tenenbaum, perhaps a healthier option, but slavery
nonetheless. And after the game ends, we witness is the death of Jack, the
player character; then, and only then are we released from the slavery of the
game, both narratively and abstractly. However, to further complicate this
notion of being a slave to freedom, Camus continues, “But at the same time the
absurd man realizes that hitherto he was bound to that postulate of freedom on
the illusion of which he was living. In a certain sense, that hampered him. To
the extent to which he imagined a purpose to his life, he adapted himself to
the demand of a purpose to be achieved and became the slave of his liberty” (Sisyphus 57-58). This follow-through can
be applied to Bioshock in the usual dichotomy, both narratively and experientially.
In both senses, when the player believes he is attempting to help Atlas reunite
with his lost family, he or she progresses through the game in a manner not
unlike Camus mentions, in an adaptive manner in order to reach the goal
specified, playing the game more as an adventure within a new world. When the
game shifts to its different narrative platform, the player realizes to an
extent the slavery that he or she was put under the entire game. Because of
this realization the focus shifts from the manner in which the player plays the
first section to little more than a mere progression through the rest of the
game, with the only difficulty attempting to overcome obstacles in that
progression, i.e. becoming a big daddy, escorting little sisters, killing
Fontaine. This is as Camus suggests, “In a certain sense, that [misguided
illusion of freedom] hampered [the player].” This incarceration of the audience
is as just as much a vital part of The
Plague as it is of Bioshock. The motif
of slavery is seen throughout the novel as well as Camus’ own Absurdist
thinking, so much so that “In an early stage of composition, Camus noted he did
not want to call his book The Plague
but rather something like The Prisoners,
perhaps to highlight its theme of universal incarceration, the sense that, as
represented by Oran, all the world’s a dungeon” (Kellman 98). As Rieux
poignantly states at the beginning of The
Plague, "They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so
long as there are pestilences” (35).
Perhaps the greatest parallel between
the plots of The Plague and Bioshock is that the protagonist and/or narrator
is never revealed until the very near end of the narrative. In the case of The Plague, the entire novel is
presented in a third person account, and only at the very last chapter of Part
V, does the character Dr. Rieux reveal that he has been the narrator of the
entire book. This functions as a way to present the sordid account of the
struggle against plague in Oran in an objective way, which also distances the
viewer from the events taking place. This type of shift also occurs in Bioshock where the player plays through
the massive majority of the game believing they are playing as a character
stranded in Rapture due to a plane crash. Only until meeting Andrew Ryan does
one realize that they have been a member of Rapture all along, guided by a
catchphrase embedded in Jack, the player character’s genetic code. Whereas a
player thought they were playing freely throughout the entire game, they player
had been following the exact instructions given to him or her in a sequential
method. The final charge in The Plague
had been to realize the narrator, Rieux, was in the middle of the events taking
place within the narrative the whole time, effectively changing the way the
reader viewed the actions taken by both Rieux as well as changing the attitude
toward all the entire experience. I argue that Bioshock does a more thorough and more immersive job of this type
of meta-media experience. When a player realizes that he or she has essentially
been a slave within the game events, it also rings true that the entire game,
in a sense, enslaves the player to a certain path through the assistance of
level design. These levels are meant to guide a player in one specific path,
only allowing for an infinitesimal amount of actions to be performed. Both of
these realizations, however, serve to take viewers out of the realm that they
are immersed and place them in that metaphysical void that they experiences
when they find themself a stranger in their own universe. In that way, both of
these narrative displacements serve to confront the audience with the Absurd.
“Thus the absurd man realizes that he was not really free” (Sisyphus 58). This lack of freedom as
seen in the contained environment in The
Plague, which could be interpreted as both the closed walls of the city of
Oran as well as the constant structure of the story as a book, and the
restricted milieu of Bioshock, as
seen in the confined space of Rapture, as well as the limits of room design, is
absolutely crucial in developing a situation in which to showcase the absurd.
The plague as described in The Plague is easily transferred from a
bacterial disease to a cultural one, relatable back to both Bioshock and the Absurd. Amidst the
beginning of Part IV of The Plague
the character Jean Tarrou offers the story of his life previous to arriving at
Oran. In his description he relates the tale of accompanying his father, a
lawyer, to work one day and witnessing him condemn to death a small, owlish man
whom Tarrou eventually witnesses brutally decapitated. After this horrifying
observation, Tarrou decides to do what he can to rid the social order around
him of murder and its related injustice. He fights on the left Republican side
of the Spanish Civil War, subsequently through witnessing a man condemned to
death by firing squad in Hungary realizes that the same plague he had been
fighting against was as much engrained in himself as those he’d witnessed it in
prior. He states in the final throes of his account, “I have realized that we
all have plague, and I have lost my peace. And today I am still trying to find
it; still trying to understand all those others and not to be the mortal enemy
of anyone… The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has
the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous will-power, a never
ending tension of the mind, to avoid such lapses… But that is also why some of
us, those who want to get the plague out of their systems, feel such desperate
weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free except death”
(Plague 228-229). This is an
unabashed nod to Absurdist concepts, whereas after being confronted with the
Absurd the only rational manner of coping is to live constantly in its wake,
and only death offers escape from the meaningless human condition. Only through
constant acknowledgement of this “plague state” can one avoid further
contamination of themselves and others. This is just as evident in Bioshock, where the player, through
Jack, is led to the same conclusion as Tarrou. The conclusion being that the
player is not a pure, meaningful soul in the midst of the plague-ridden, but
that there is no distinction between the plague, and that the plague exists
both in the evil Jack encounters in the game, but also in the way the player
has been led by adroit and condemned predisposition through the game space.
Merton writes in relation to The Plague,
“The real drama of the book is found in the contrapuntal treatment of the theme
of evil on two levels: the Plague as physical evil and the Plague as a
deficiency in the human spirit, a challenge which summons up the deepest
resources of the human conscience in its capacity for courage and love” (13).
I now return to The Myth of Sisyphus to conclude my analysis. I have previously
outlined several of the main connecting points between The Plague and Bioshock
and their relation to the notion of the Absurd, a notion that arises from the
time-proven fact that humans search for meaning in life meeting with the
time-proven fact that the universe offers no such meaning and staunchly cannot
provide one. Camus offers his insight on the Absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus, so it seems only natural to conclude with a
contrast within the two mediums being compared and its text. The Plague takes its reader through the
tale of a mid-twentieth century city stricken by plague, and attempts to
provide a structural ground by which the reader, just as Rieux does in the
novel, is allowed to confront and experience the Absurd in a confrontational
design. Bioshock, as a
representational game, puts the player in the foreign underwater city of
Rapture, and through a series of relations and struggles, allows the player
through Jack to encounter the same Absurd revelation in both a direct and
metaphysical manner. In a direct contradiction to Andrew Ryan’s memorable
quote, “A man chooses, a slave obeys” Camus replies “Man does not choose. The
absurd and the extra life it involves therefore
do not depend on man’s will, but on its contrary, which is death” (Sisyphus 63). Camus writes in The Myth of Sisyphus, “The absurd
enlightens me on this point: there is no future. Henceforth this is the reason
for my inner freedom. … Losing oneself in that bottomless certainty, feeling henceforth
sufficiently remote from one’s own life to increase it and take a broad view of
it – this involves the principle of a liberation. … The divine availability of
the condemned man before whom the prison doors open in a certain early dawn,
that unbelievable disinterestedness with regard to everything except for the
pure flame of life- it is clear that death and the absurd are here the
principles of the only reasonable freedom: that which a human heart can
experience and live” (58-60). Lastly, just as Sisyphus, the Absurd hero, after
one puts down The Plague or turns off
Bioshock; one must imagine them
happy.
Works
Cited
Camus, Albert. The Plague.
Trans. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Random House, 1947. Print.
Camus, Albert. The Myth of
Sisyphus and Other Essays. Trans. Justin O’Brien. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf,
1955. Print.
Foley, John. Albert Camus:
From the Absurd to Revolt. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008.
Print.
Kellman, Steven G. The
Plague: Fiction and Resistance. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993. Print.
Merton, Thomas. Albert
Camus’ The Plague: Introduction and Commentary. New York: Seabury Press,
1968. Print.
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