پرهام ابراهیمی

For decades, humans have struggled with the concept of absurdity. Men face absurdity in their everyday routine as they go through experiences and diverse conditions like death and the meaningle  ess of life. To better define absurdity, Camus in his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, tries to elaborate on man’s desire to find meaning and happiness in life. He defines absurdity, as a confrontation between the unlimited desire of man to find an objective meaning to life and the meaningle  ess of the real world. This confrontation, Camus suggests, is what evokes the feeling of absurdity because eventually, man finds a meaningless universe where he questions the value of life. This confrontation between the dreaming man versus the actual world can be seen in Edgar Allan Poe’s poems. Poe, in his poems, describes the harsh realities of life and portrays them through his narrators. The narrators in his poems are in a constant struggle to battle the absurdities of life, find or abandon hope in an absurd life, and seek happiness and meaning in material reality. The attitudes of Poe’s narrators in his poems are very much like the absurd man that Camus introduces in his essay. Therefore, this research tries to illustrate that the narrators in Edgar Allan Poe’s poems have the same characteristics as the absurd hero that Camus describes in his theories of the absurd. Furthermore, this study tries to show whether the narrator of Poe’s poems can find happiness or even meaning in their struggles in an absurd world, or not.