The Crisis of the Absurd in Orlando Patterson's An Absence of Ruins

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus states: 'In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home country or the hope of a promised land.'' Orlando Patterson, in a sociological monograph, describes 'the modern crisis' as 'the problem of exile, alienation, rootlessness, being and identity'.^ Patterson's fictional works, as well as his non-fictional studies in sociology and social philosophy, are explicidy and heavily indebted to the writings of Camus and Sartre.^ Indeed, he finds in Existentialism the deepest analysis of the 'modern crisis' or, as he also terms it, the 'exilic crisis'.