The essay covers three books. The first is “The Closing of the American Mind” by alan bloom, “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley, and “The myth of Sisyphus” by Albert Camus translated by justin o’brien. The teacher focuses on how the middle sections for the alan bloom reading. mainly from pages 100-313. In the albert camus reading the teacher focuses on the absurdity that is born out of the confrontation of human need for happiness and the unreasonable silence of the world. In this reading he also focuses on how absurdity is brought to light by consciousness and how everyday we are alive is a constant day-to-day revolt. These ideas are illustrated on pages 53-55. The teacher also points to the end of the novel as being important in showing that one resigns himself to his fate in the idea that “all is well” and that this helps one to overcome/ live through the nothingness and meaninglessness of life. Most importantly the teacher cites at the end of the book, the actual myth of sisyphus and how we must imagine sisyphus as being happy despite the punishment beset on him from the gods and how the struggle itself “is enough to fill a man’s heart”. Even though Sisyphus is punished he cannot be defeated or punished completely because he is maintaining the struggle giving him as much a hold on the power over him as it has on him. He creates his own meaning, in a sense conquering the absurd. These sentiments are illustrated from pages 119-123. In the last novel “Brave New World” there is a large importance placed on the conditioning of the individual and how there is a false happiness that is created through this conditioning. P. 173 in this novel “Brave New World” illustrates a similar point as the myth of sisyphus when the character John explains that “it isn’t necessary. But some kinds of baseness are nobly undergone. I’d like to undergo something nobly. Don’t you see?”. This is an important link between the novels showing how one resigns himself to his fate and it helps to free him from false senses of freedom and the absurdity that exists within the world. The pages and points I highlighted are main themes, but there are also other important passages in the books that work to show that there are countless structures and agents within society that control, but people can be free within these apparatuses. Then there has to be a link between this freedom and social change in general.