El hombre perdido: Ramón Gómez de la Serna y Albert Camus

Abstract

This article deals with the connection between two prose works published during the years after World War ii: El hombre perdido (1947) by Ramón Gómez de la Serna and La chute (1956) by Albert Camus. The article examines the relationship from a philosophical and political perspective and establishes the coincidences in both writers’ works. The city, the solitary stroller, the distance from «gregariousness» and the defense of the individual coincide with a leitmotiv, suicide, which has been insistently present during the 1940s as a consequence of contemporary unease, war, Nazism and the socialist totalitarianism imposed on the USSR and supported by many European and American intellectual groups.