The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy_ I Link Therefore I Am - Luke Cuddy [26]
The Triforce and the harmony that it symbolizes is shattered, and through Link’s actions he must restore that harmony. He must bring meaning back into the hostile, godless Hyrule. Although existentialism has sometimes been seen as a loner’s branch of philosophy, a dark and godless belief system, this is not quite the case. There’s a complex duality at play in the existentialist worldview. There’s a sense of solitude in that every man is responsible for his own life and making himself into the god he needs to be to live well, but at the same time there is this solidarity in the shared human condition. It’s notable that Nietzsche uses the first person plural “we”—we must become gods.
In the Zelda games, Link is essentially alone. But there is a connection, a link, if you will, between our hero and the rest of the game world. He has his helpers in the figures of the old men, old women, Navi, Twili and others, but more importantly his solitary actions are shown to have great effects on his entire world. In Ocarina, we can see Link’s heroism unfreeze the waters of Zora’s Domain and rid the verdure of Kokiri forest of man eating plants and nasty spiders. The harmony his actions restore even create an aural harmony in a switch of game music from sinister to soothing. Although physically alone, the life of Link, and the life of a human in existentialist thought, is anything but entirely isolated and ineffectual. The struggle for personal meaning and morality inveitably benefits the world beyond. By saving the world, Link is existing in a way that will realize his essence as a hero.
In some ways Link’s heroism is absurd. He does not exactly choose his quest so much as it is thrust upon him. Not only is the problem of choice at play in Zelda, but there is also the overwhelming repetition of the hero’s tasks—another labyrinth to map out, more Dodongos to feed bombs, and with each new game in the Zelda series, yet another world-repairing quest. It almost seems that the task of the Zelda gamer is what we’d call a “Sisyphean” task. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a man condemned by the gods to push a rock to the top of a mountain, at which point the rock would fall back down for Sisyphus to go after and on and on for eternity.
Albert Camus does an existential reading of this myth that depicts Sisyphus as an “absurd hero,” one who is happy even in his punishment.24 Sisyphus’s contentment comes from his self-awareness. Camus writes of Sisyphus’s ownership of his task, “His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols” (p. 91). By reflecting on his fate the absurd hero in his task becomes somehow more important than the gods that gave it to him. We see a similar shift in emphasis in Zelda. Link has to save the world (again and again) because Ganon has put the world in peril (again and again), but Ganon’s instigating role barely even matters. It is the hero Link, the little boy trying to save the princess and become a man, that we care about.
Life of Link: Boy Becomes Man
In Legend of Zelda, though Link does seem to have a slight degree of pre-determination in his life, the game is centered on his fulfillment of his hero role, his god role; it is not something he