Writing Vulnerable Villains: the “Sisyphus” Trope Explained

本站添加: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]Sisyphus is one of the most enduring character types in Western literature, history, and philosophy. A man whose cunning enabled him to defy the gods, but at great cost.

[00:00:09]We remember him as the guy doomed to roll a boulder up a hill, but never reach the top without it rolling all the way back down.

[00:00:16]Just from that, I think you can see why people have been so fascinated by this character and what his story can be interpreted to mean. I've been inspired to make this video because I've been talking so much about Maul, Shadow Lord, on this channel lately, and you can't really talk about Maul without mentioning his connection to this Greek myth as explained here by Freddie Prinze Jr., the voice of Kanan Jarrus from Star Wars Rebels. So, Darth Maul is Sisyphus. He was cursed to roll a boulder up a mountain for all eternity, only to have it roll all the way back to the bottom when he gets to the top, or regardless of how high he gets. At a certain point, it's always going to roll to the bottom.

[00:00:54]And he knows this going in.

[00:00:57]He knows his life is destined for the uphill climb, for repeated failure after repeated failure, for all eternity. And that is Darth Maul. Maul is one of the most compelling examples of a modern-day Sisyphus, but he's not the only one.

[00:01:14]I've identified, among others, Successions Kendall Roy and Breaking Bad's Walter White as examples, intentionally on the writer's part or otherwise, of the Sisyphus trope.

[00:01:25]So, today, I want to examine the origins of the Sisyphus story, analyze how the modern characters I just listed off are Sisyphus types, but also what people have made of this archetype throughout different points in Western history, and how Sisyphus is a kind of Antichrist figure, actually. Let me explain.

[00:01:44]We have to begin with Greek mythology.

[00:01:46]And like much of Greek mythology, we can't really point to a specific origin point or writer or something, and we're just never going to know for sure.

[00:01:53]That's just how it works. Sisyphus is mentioned across various ancient sources. In the Odyssey by Homer, we learn that he's in Tartarus, or the deepest pit in hell, rolling his boulder, but not really why. In Hesiod, we learn that he's the most cunning of all mortals, but not really in any detail.

[00:02:10]He gets some mentions here and there, but we have to remember, so many Greek myths, whether as poems, or plays, or dialogues, or histories, are now lost to time for all sorts of reasons.

[00:02:21]The main source is this one guy, Apollodorus, who gives us the story in his Library.

[00:02:27]Sisyphus was the king of ancient Corinth. Maybe he founded Corinth, and he married a daughter of the Titan Atlas, the world-holding [music] guy.

[00:02:36]He betrayed Zeus by revealing certain secrets, and was sent to the underworld.

[00:02:40]Different stories have different versions of how he managed to escape Hades. In one version, he chains up the god of death himself, Thanatos, before he flees. And people everywhere begin to just not die, which was a problem for Hades.

[00:02:57]Eventually, Sisyphus is sent back into Tartarus and given his famous punishment. Like many Greek myths, there's a lot happening in the subtext of Sisyphus.

[00:03:06]It reflects this Hellenic interest in the power of intelligence and cunning that you see in characters like Odysseus and Oedipus, as well as, to borrow Tolkien's phrase, the desire for deathlessness, but also the limits of mortality and the danger of arrogantly reaching above the limits that nature has set for you. So, that's a sketch of where we get Sisyphus from.

[00:03:28]Like many characters in Greek mythology, he quickly becomes an archetype for, you know, the rest of time. In general, there are two versions of the Sisyphus trope or archetype, which I've divided into premodern and modern. And each takes a different stance on whether Sisyphus is admirable or pitiful.

[00:03:48]For the premoderns, the Romans, the medievals, and the Renaissance humanists, Sisyphus is seen as a moral allegory and a cautionary tale.

[00:03:56]For the moderns, which we'll say roughly is the Enlightenment down to the 20th century, Sisyphus is a symbol of defiance. So, we'll start with Rome through the Renaissance.

[00:04:09]As you may know, Roman civilization eventually overtook the Greek, but it absorbed a lot of the culture. And as you also may know, the Germanic barbarians eventually did a similar thing to Rome.

[00:04:20]Much of Roman history is digesting Greece, and much of medieval civilization is digesting Rome. And the Renaissance is kind of just a new way of looking at medieval stuff. Anyways, the story is basically the same. Guy trick gods, guy go to hell, guy come back, guy push boulder.

[00:04:37]Ovid's is probably the most popular version of the Sisyphus myth, and almost certainly the main version that passed on to the Middle Ages, who loved their Ovid. Ovid is a Roman writer, by the way.

[00:04:49]Roman philosophers like Seneca and Lucretius, however, really go hard into the allegory.

[00:04:55]Sisyphus' punishment is an illustration of the restless, pointless vanity of pursuing evil goals. The soul trapped in vice, rather than the one that embraces virtue, is essentially stuck in this hell of their own making. It's arrogance, it's pride, it's blindness to what really matters.

[00:05:13]It's the way you can enslave yourself.

[00:05:15]For Lucretius in particular, Sisyphus is taken to represent the futility of looking for political power in vain.

[00:05:23]Now, Sisyphus is never like the main guy of any text. There's never like an He's usually just referenced in passing, or you'll get like a small section on him.

[00:05:34]And just because you know his story, you get the metaphor.

[00:05:38]This is very much the case as we move into the Middle Ages, who generally follow Lucretius' lead about the story symbolizing the vanity of political striving.

[00:05:47]Renaissance guys like Boccaccio and Erasmus say roughly the same thing. The boulder symbolizes a burden that you should not seek to carry, like undue political power, or the weight of the guilt of sin.

[00:06:00]So, in summary, option A, the premodern view, is that Sisyphus sucks, but sucks in a way that you should pity him. You do not want to be a Sisyphus.

[00:06:10]There are better and more joyful things available for those who live humbly, wisely, and justly.

[00:06:16]Sisyphus wastes his life in futile labor. For what? Just nothing.

[00:06:21]Whereas others may die, but for goodness. Greek heroes can die for glory, Romans for honor, Christians for love. Sisyphus lived and died, and then lived and died for himself.

[00:06:33]And the punishment is just a physical illustration of that. Tartarus in this view is just living out the hidden reality of what you've spent your life doing.

[00:06:46]The modern view, option B, is often, but not always, a little nicer to Sisyphus.

[00:06:52]And just a note, modern is such a fuzzy term, and I don't really have an opinion for where modernity begins, somewhere in the 1600s, I guess.

[00:07:01]Now, honestly, as far as modern Sisyphus goes, there's not that much. I I really couldn't find that many mentions, if any, of him throughout this period until we get to the 20th century with Albert Camus' famous existentialist essay, The Myth of Sisyphus.

[00:07:20]Um so, I'm not really going to talk about like any particular mention of him like you can find for the premodern period, but the general vibe of like philosophy and ethics where that's going sort of sets up what Camus talks about.

[00:07:32]So, as I said, in the premodern view of Sisyphus, he's a figure of restlessness and rebellion. But once we start getting into the Enlightenment and the Romantic period and etc., restlessness and rebellion are viewed more positively than before. And this is for many reasons, good and bad. You start to see in movements like the French Revolution, this desire to push through systems that seem pointless and arbitrary and oppressive. Like this society bad stuff begins then.

[00:07:59]And in the Romantic era, people begin to valorize struggle in and of itself, even more so than struggling for something good. And so, you can imagine that I think Sisyphus would be a more tragically sympathetic figure, the guy who's struggling and failing, but keeps pushing nonetheless. And this feeds into modern philosophy, people like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, whose names are really difficult to spell, who begin confronting the idea of like the pointlessness of life, or the apparent pointlessness of life, and what do we do about that?

[00:08:31]If we can't know what life is for, then look at Sisyphus. How can he be such a bad guy if we're all Sisyphi?

[00:08:39]And here we get into the text that I mentioned before, Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus, from which we get the famous phrase, "You must imagine Sisyphus happy."

[00:08:48]For Camus, Sisyphus embodies the absurd man, or the man who realizes, accepts, and does not despair about the fact that everything is pointless. Sisyphus embodies his idea of lucidity, becoming conscious to the reality of the world.

[00:09:02]He pictures Sisyphus as someone who loved life so much that he refused to leave it, and somebody who, when the boulder falls down and he has to go back and start again, finds joy in the fact that uh he exists, I guess, and things exist.

[00:09:18]Camus is an existentialist, shocking.

[00:09:24]So, the old Sisyphus, cautionary tale.

[00:09:27]The new, tragic hero. The most important Sisyphus type guy I can think of, and I didn't know where else to put this section, so I'm sticking it here, is Satan, actually, in John Milton's Paradise Lost.

[00:09:40]He sort of combines both views, which makes sense, as Milton was sort of in between our modern and premodern periods. Milton's Satan has disturbed and fascinated readers since its publishing. He's portrayed as a rebel prince, a person of real nobility and greatness, though at the same time he is certainly pathetic and evil and miserable.

[00:09:59]He's doomed himself to perpetual rebellion.

[00:10:02]Once again, he'll never win, but he'll keep trying. And he'll do so much damage in the process, like screwing with Adam and Eve. So, let's return to the guys that I promised we'd go with at the start. Maul, Kendall, Heisenberg. Nightmare blunt rotation.

[00:10:18]This will contain spoilers for Star Wars generally, Succession and Breaking Bad. Brief recaps if you're unfamiliar with these characters or need a refresher.

[00:10:29]Maul's story spans a couple movies and a few TV shows. Formerly Darth Maul, he was the Sith apprentice to Darth Sidious, aka Palpatine, in The Phantom Menace.

[00:10:39]He was the first Sith to publicly emerge in a millennia during the events of that movie. He slew Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn before he was seemingly killed by Padawan Obi-Wan Kenobi.

[00:10:49]His mother, Talzin, a Night Sister witch, sent his brother Savage about 13 years later on a quest to recover him.

[00:10:57]Upon his return, he mounted his own quest to carve out a power base during the Clone Wars and to get revenge on Kenobi.

[00:11:05]While he briefly succeeds at taking the planet Mandalore and a bunch of crime syndicates, he is defeated at the end of the war and goes to ground. Maul: Shadow Hunter is filling in the gaps to where he eventually emerges as a major crime boss in Solo until he is found in Rebels, another TV show, somehow abandoned and alone and empire-less, but dangerous and looking for a way off the planet Malachor. He finds it and begins his last quest, one final round of vengeance on Obi-Wan, which of course he fails. Second, Kendall Roy is the second child, but self-proclaimed eldest boy of corporate titan Logan Roy, who runs Waystar RoyCo, which is kind of like, I think if you cross like Disney with Fox.

[00:11:52]Oh, wait.

[00:11:53]Kendall begins the series on the loose premise that his father, aging and in poor health, will soon retire.

[00:11:59]A promise that is quickly broken.

[00:12:02]The series details, among other things, Kendall's various bids for power, hostile takeovers, a Me Too-style crusade, and a bunch of things in the middle.

[00:12:11]He's constantly thwarted by his siblings, other executives, his apparently invincible dad, but more than anything, his own destructive and just addictive habits and his inability to take criticism. He's left at the end of the series with nothing he cares about.

[00:12:26]And lastly, Walter White, who needs no introduction.

[00:12:30]Midlife crisis chemistry teacher, gets a cancer diagnosis, coerces a former student into making illicit substances with him.

[00:12:37]He breaks bad and then claws his way up through the criminal underworld to become, for a brief moment, a major crime boss.

[00:12:45]But all the while, his secrecy and his risk-taking destroys his family and all for the sake of your pride and your ego.

[00:12:51]He kind of makes amends at the very end, though he's carved a bloody trail of destruction for everyone and everything he tried to do personally and professionally.

[00:13:01]I think you see the patterns, ambition, cunning, but a kind of vulnerability.

[00:13:06]Unlike villains who are usually one step ahead of the more heroic characters till the very end, Sisyphi are often heroically on the back foot, and this is why these characters are so lovable and have such a big support within their respective fandoms. And in that way, I think we see a version of the modern view I talked about earlier. There's something inherently noble about constant defiance. But overall, I think these actually really embody the pre-modern Sisyphus.

[00:13:34]These guys may be sympathetic, but they're still bad people who become, with time, worse people, and their stories amount to pity and caution. Now, I think a Sisyphus character is actually probably more difficult to write because, as I'm sure you've also picked up on, they are defined by repetition.

[00:13:50]They are doing the same thing over and over and over again, and by definition, such a character doesn't have an arc. At best, it's a downward spiral, and usually that's a bad thing for a story.

[00:14:01]But for a Sisyphus, it's the entire point. You're watching a drama of stagnation, and Star Wars, Succession, and Breaking Bad all do a great job illustrating the stuff that you'd miss in the quest for power.

[00:14:12]Walter especially.

[00:14:14]The way that his growing self-confidence comes at the expense of his family, which means the expense of love, of security, of peace of mind. Maul's quest for an apprentice is in many ways his quest to overcome loneliness, but the dark side is inherently lonely because it's a constant pursuit of power. Kendall starts in a place of alienation from literally everyone he loves and continues to get only more and more lonely until the very end.

[00:14:41]Now, I said at the beginning, Sisyphus is a kind of Antichrist.

[00:14:46]What the heck did I mean by that?

[00:14:53]Well, it's these modern characters that really capture the more forgettable part of the Sisyphus story that I think only Camus really picks up on, the rise from the dead. So, like our Lord and savior.

[00:15:05]But the resurrection of the Sisyphus is an inverted resurrection. These three characters climb their way out of deaths of various kinds, literal in one case, but also metaphorical. Maul literally is resurrected by the writers. Kendall begins the series recently in recovery for drugs, and at the end of season 2, blasts his way out of corporate death at the Cruises press conference.

[00:15:28]And of course, remember all the schemes before, during, and after that whole thing. Walt survives a number of increasingly fatal close shaves from the DEA, from Tuco, from Gus, from basically everyone. Satan as well. Milton begins with him being cast down from heaven, and the story is him clawing his way back towards vengeance. Once again, the admirable part of the story is that they just won't quit.

[00:15:51]They might get close to winning. They might use a new tactic. They might be at rock bottom. They might gain some serious ground. And maybe most tantalizing of any option, they might actually be offered a chance to escape the cycle, and maybe they'll flirt with the idea. You want them to take the way out, right? You want them to actually win because they're so defined by not being at peace.

[00:16:13]And you really do want to see them rewarded for their efforts at some point.

[00:16:18]If nothing else, to stop causing so much pain for others. But this is why it's Antichrist.

[00:16:24]The hows and whys of these resurrections are, as I said, inverted. For a Christ figure, death is to be accepted, even embraced, and is usually a sacrifice or a martyrdom. For a Sisyphus, death is to be rejected because it's feared. It's the end of activity and ambition. They claw their way out of death. I'm saying claw a lot, but that's the perfect word, right? They're just They're scratching and biting and like fighting so hard against nature and even their own best interests.

[00:16:53]Jesus died and rose to turn death into a doorway to new life.

[00:16:58]Christ figures tend to die at the end of their stories, and resurrection is a kind of reward to enable a happy ending.

[00:17:04]This is what Tolkien calls the consolation of a fairy story in his essay on fairy stories, which I referenced in my last video about the Star Wars Inquisitors.

[00:17:13]This is the hope that death isn't the end.

[00:17:16]It may even be a beginning. But another thing about Maul is that he and the Sith fear death more than anything.

[00:17:23]This is why Palpatine has to have contingencies, and why the cloning stories of Dark Empire Legends and Rise of Skywalker, while they are terrible, they're not the worst conceptually.

[00:17:35]The Jedi, having hope of another life, are even more empowered by death, like Obi-Wan says. They're like Christian saints.

[00:17:43]Sith only have life, kind of like what Camus said. They have to hold on by whatever means necessary. Now, there's one really interesting counterexample that comes to mind.

[00:17:53]Gandalf. If you can tell from this and my other videos, I really like Tolkien.

[00:17:57]Rather than his resurrection being a reward for having, you know, finished the story well, he comes back like a Sisyphus to take care of unfinished business. But if we look at Gandalf's resurrection, we'll be able to spot the differences more clearly.

[00:18:11]Gandalf dies to defend the fellowship against the Balrog in Moria and is sent back. Passive verb there, sent. It's a thing that happens to him.

[00:18:21]Like a Sisyphus, he has to complete a seemingly impossible task, one that he's been at for centuries at least.

[00:18:28]But it's not his task. It's not self-aggrandizing. And his resurrection wasn't by his own power.

[00:18:34]Gandalf serves a higher power, the Valar, who in turn serve the One.

[00:18:40]He describes himself as a servant, a servant of the Secret Fire. In the books, he tells Denethor, Steward of Gondor, that he, too, is a steward.

[00:18:48]While his enemies, like Saruman and Grima and Denethor, accuse him of being a sort of mastermind schemer striving for his own power, Gandalf only ever takes or wields authority when absolutely necessary.

[00:19:02]In fact, for wizard, Gandalf doesn't really use a ton of magic, either. And when the business is over, he's gone. He leaves.

[00:19:09]Compare this to in Lord of the Rings, Sauron, who, now that I think of it, is kind of a Sisyphus. He can't bear to lose, hence why he makes the ring in the first place, so he can persist long after his defeat.

[00:19:20]Then, let's scale it back down from Sauron to Maul, Kendall, and Walt.

[00:19:25]They only want to return to settle scores and grow their power. This is why when they return from death, they are so tormented and broken. Gandalf the White is even more powerful than Gandalf the Grey. Jesus is thought to be in his transfigured body after the resurrection. Obi-Wan is blue. But the Sisyphi rise on the power of their own hatred.

[00:19:47]And so it's that hatred that keeps them together, but in shambles.

[00:19:51]They can only try again in a worse state than they ever did before. Walter and Kendall's self-destructive tendencies only get worse after their explosive victories, meaning that the next fall is even harder.

[00:20:04]And this is something I love about Star Wars, the way it can illustrate these concepts. Just look at how horrific Maul's resurrection is. He's this like spider guy. Like he's going insane in this garbage pit, kept alive by the force of rage. And speaking of Maul, as I conclude here, I think this is why he's still an interesting character despite the fact that like years ago now, we we know how he dies. We saw his death and it was a satisfying end. But because he's a Sisyphus, there's something more to be said every time.

[00:20:34]This archetype is repetitive, but not a bad kind of repetitive. And that's a little rare, so it's kind of cool.

[00:20:40]Ultimately, I guess the true spirit of a Sisyphus character, I'm going to land on Tolkien again, is Gollum. Like he's the least noble of these characters because his goal is the least expansive. He just wants something to satisfy himself.

[00:20:55]But at the end of the day, that's all a Sisyphus wants.

[00:20:59]It's all about them. They are just Gollum.

[00:21:02]Right? They're just this pathetic creature and it's kind of sad and you'd save them if you could, maybe.

[00:21:08]But how redeemable are they really?

[00:21:11]So, that's all I have to say. I hope you enjoyed this analysis. If this video does well, I'd love to do more deep dives into important archetypal characters.

[00:21:20]Actually, this channel is small. I don't care. I'm going to do more deep dives.

[00:21:24]I'm currently writing one on King Arthur, so please like, subscribe, and let me know what you think and what you'd like to see more of. Thank you and God bless.