Camus traces the idea of rebellion from metaphysical revolt against God through revolutionary politics and terror, asking whether rebellion can be lived without collapsing into the very murder and tyranny it rises against.
Books mentioned in The Rebel (10)
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville: “How can we imagine anything to follow Moby Dick, The Trial, Zarathustra, The Possessed?”
The Trial by Franz Kafka: “How can we imagine anything to follow Moby Dick, The Trial, Zarathustra, The Possessed?”
The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoevsky: “the era of Chigalevism begins—proclaimed, in The Possessed, by Verkhovensky, the nihilist who claims the right to choose”
Don Juan by Molière: “begin by sniggering up their sleeves and end—with Moliere's Don Juan—by laughing to high heaven.”
Pensées by Blaise Pascal: “The Will to Power ends, like Pascal's Pensees, of which it so often reminds us, with a wager.”
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte: “Heathcliff, in Wuthering Heights, would kill everybody on earth in order to possess Cathy, but it would never occur to him to say that murder is reasonable or theoretically defensible.”
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev: “the very term nihilism was invented by Turgeniev in his novel Fathers and Sons, whose hero, Bazarov, was an exact portrayal of this type of man.”
Paradise Lost by John Milton: “The struggle between Satan and death in Paradise Lost, the favorite poem of the romantics, symbolizes this drama”
Appeal to the Slavs by Mikhail Bakunin: “Engels, with the approval of Marx, dispassionately accepted this prospect when he wrote in answer to Bakunin's Appeal to the Slavs”
Force and Matter by Ludwig Büchner: “They called themselves materialists; their bedside book was Buchner's Force and Matter.”