It is defined in one page which will be the matter of the book: the absurd like a departure point for a series of reasonings
that not necessarily will have to be coherent.
In the following sixty pages the author plays with the thought of a philosophical
suicide, that is to say, a suicide that comes more from ideas than of feeling of a biological or chemical depression. The suicide like a cruel and practically impossible situation of being carried out in the reality. Hypothetical crossroads that come more from the mind than of the heart, so to speak. In that sense, a great part of this book could be considered as if Mersault - the personage of "the foreigner" - had been put to think profoundly instead of to coldly describe the situations by which it is called on to him to pass in that novel of this same author. Here are the threads or reasons that move Sea-Sun Algerian to behave in the way in which he does.To Camus the suicide seems to be the only subject truely important to consider in this life, the rest are not more than games of the human mind.
Paradoxicalally, if the moment of temptation is surpassed to kill itself, a situation occurs that puts of the world and the possibility remote of seeing it with other eyes: those of the astonishment.
Philosophers predecessors of him like Jaspers, Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Chestov, have considered the subject of which there is of foolish in the existence, but all they have solved it of a way or another one. No one had bold to remain in the preposterous thing since Albert does in this work. Somehow the named philosophers have wavered to maintain the rationality in the middle of the general silly thing by means of the faith or some other class of device that allowed them to leave the labyrinth of the mind.
The Playboy it is defined like another absurd personage whom it looks for to exhaust itself in the field of the loving relations, or somebody that when not being able to choose between several women a single one, choose to have them all and this take it tear to its consequent.
It is spoken of the creation in a world signed by the foolish thing and Camus mentions authors characteristic of this new form to give light and to eter conflicts to us: Dostoievsky and Kafka.
In the end we find a Camus that seems to be coming to the light after series of dark lucubrations, that still leaves a space for the hope that will come in its later work, wich was interrupted by its tragic death in an automobile accident.
What the author throughout all the book proposes is to remain in a world opposed to the reason with schemes that follow the line of this. Then, in last instance, it is a revolt act.