The aim of this study is to shed new light on Camus’s reception of Nietzsche and to examine the extent to which Nietzsche’s philosophy of eternal return and Dionysian affirmation underlies Camus’s early essay The Myth of Sisyphus. Not only does Nietzsche’s doctrine constitute a theoretical basis for Camus’s philosophy of the absurd but the affinity between the two philosophers also manifests itself on a philological level through their preference for aphorisms and essays and their recourse to poetic patterns and procedures. In both Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Myth of Sisyphus, while rejecting any systematic and conceptualizing approach, criticism of language is combined with the search for a philosophical expression capable of accounting for the absurdity of human experience. In this sense, the eternal return is symptomatic of Nietzsche’s philosophy, which does not rely on systematic argumentation, but rather, especially in his later works, proceeds on the basis of mytho-poetic images and patterns that cannot easily be translated into conceptual terms. Presumably, Camus’s fascination with Nietzsche emanated precisely from these transitions between philosophy and literature.