Analysis Of ' The Way Meursault '

At the end of the novel, Meursault is able to understand the meaning of life. He was able to do so because he was approaching death, which is an existentialist principle, death is the one certainty of life. Before, when his mother died or when he killed the Arab, he did not have any feelings. When he thought about his own life and that he was about to die, he accepted it. He realizes that one can truly enjoy their lives when they approach and accept death. The understanding of this allowed Meursault to be at peace with himself. With this being said, this novel was an unusually good book, which made me think. A majority of the book made me feel like the rest of society, which was not accepting Meursault's behavior although analyzing gave me

I answered the same way I had last time, that it didn’t mean anything but that I probably didn’t love her. ‘So why marry, then?’ she said. I explained to her that it didn’t really matter and that if she wanted to, we could get married.” (Camus 41) A typical man when wanting to get married, shows love and affection towards her and cares if him and the woman get married. Society’s standards say that a successful marriage includes love, trust, sacrifice and communication. If Meursault and Marie were to wed, their relationship would lack all of these valued fundamentals. He wouldn’t be marrying her because he wants to and loves her, he would just being doing it because she wants to. Through all the confusion, they are still engaged to be married and she stays loyal to throughout the entire trial. She even comes to visit him once before he is executed. “… Marie shouted to me that I had to have hope. I said, ‘Yes.’ I was looking at her as she said it and I wanted to squeeze her shoulders through her dress. I wanted to feel the thin material and I didn’t really know what else I had to hope for other than that.” (Camus 75) Although he thought life was meaningless and temporary, he did have some sort of feelings for her, though he probably didn’t want to admit it. He didn’t realize it but Marie made an impact in his life.

He has no initial reaction to the news of her death, and at her funeral service he did not bother to even see her before she was buried. His lack of emotion is evident in the very first lines of the book, “Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know.” This shows that Meursault is hardly caring for his mother. Society’s standards would result in him to be in absolute mourning and wanting to go as fast as possible to her body. This is not the only example of Meursault’s lack of emotion and care for factors in his life. He does not care for love and marriage after having intercourse with someone; the society standard at this time was to get married if two partners had intercourse. He does not care for promotion and career advancement when his boss offers him a better job opportunity; the standard at that time and right now is to pursue the best career possible. In these scenarios Meursault is living free from the chains, and does whatever he thinks is right to do. Eventually, society rejects him and his ways, and he gets in trouble with the law. He is judged by society and his ways are ridiculed, making Meursault appear to be a monster.

The prosecutor often refers to Meursault's behavior at his mother’s funeral. Since Meursault showed no sign of remorse at her funeral, it was used against him repeatedly in the case that would determine his fate. This court case put Meursault in such a difficult and lonely situation, “Everything was happening without my participation. My fate was being decided without anyone so much as asking my opinion...whatever interest you can get people to take in you doesn’t last long”(Camus 98). Prison is where Meursault begins and finds his enlightenment, he spends his time there mainly thinking about the life one can experience as a free man, in prison it's where Meursault's real character shows in the entire book. Due to this, it feels like Meursault is reborn to the readers. Prison and the court case bring out a side to Meursault that was never really shown in the book, he begins to defend himself against all, “What did other people’s deaths...What would it matter if he were accused of murder and then executed because he didn’t cry at his mother’s funeral”(Camus 121)? Both Siddhartha and Meursault go through solitude in different ways but end up revealing something about their character as if they are reborn, another step toward each of their enlightenments.

In conclusion, Marie and Meursault showed many similarities and differences in mannerism, action and emotion. This statement was easily expressed by Meursault’s mind thinking, “It occurs to me that anyway, one more Sunday, was over, Mamam was buried now, that I was going back to work, and that nothing had really

Meursault says this when he comes back from his mother’s funeral and is able to convey the meaningless of life and reflect on his mother’s death. Meursault still lacks remorse or grief and fails to reminisce about his mother in a typical or normal way. Instead, Meursault feels that since now his mother is gone, his apartment is too big for him. He doesn’t express how her death affects him emotionally, but spatially and abstractly. This signifies just how alone he is and how he views himself to be too small when inhabiting such a big world. Even though Meursault fails to display any signs of distress due to his mother’s death, this scene is probably the closest he gets to somewhat admitting he misses his mother enough to notice that she

The uprise of the questioning of life emerged when Meursault mother had died. He began to

In “The Strangers” the theme is an individual life has no rational meaning or order. Albert Camus uses the word and actions of Meursault to show how an individual does not care about life. He creates the character as a passive and things come upon him. The quote in “The Strangers”, “To another question [the director of the home] replied that he had been surprised by my calm the day of the funeral. He was asked what he meant by "calm." The director then looked down at the tips of his shoes and said that I hadn’t wanted to see Maman, that I hadn’t cried once, and that I had left right after the funeral without paying my last respects at her grave”, This quote shows that Meursault doesn’t even have any emotion for his mother’s death and when he’s at the funeral, he act like a normal being, just moving on as it just happened. Meursault is really insensitive to things happening around him, he believes life will move on and everyone will die later on in life. Meursault watches a girl get beat and doesn’t do anything about it because he does not care and he beats the girls to. When he goes to jail for killing an Arab, he is sentenced to death but it doesn’t matter to him as he imagine

Etienne loved to read to Marie-Laure and tell her stories. They have a connection where they both understand what it can feel life to be aimless. Marie-Laure, due to her blindness, can relate to Etienne in a way that the world they experience is different than how it really exists. As their relationship grew stronger, Etienne begins to open up to Marie-Laure. He showed her the room where his brother stayed and the radio beacon that they had built to transmit radio broadcasts. Showing her the room was a big step in his recovery because the death of his brother was one of the things that troubled him the most. Marie-Laure often asked him questions, some of which, he did not feel comfortable answering. For example, she asked questions, such as, why he had not gone outside in years. He explained that he used to love to go outside, but after the war and the death of his brother his love for it faded and he developed a fear of large spaces. Etienne claimed he had everything he needed inside along with his books and music for entertainment. The connection they formed slowly began to nurture Etienne back to a sane mindset. The most important factor that led to his change was the day he stepped outside for the first time in years. Etienne was so worried that Marie-Laure was not going to come back from the bakery that he pulled together the courage to go

was sent to execution because society did not like the way that he reacted to certain aspects in life. Both Edna and Meursault drove themselves into a dead end when the decided to gorge their ideas into life and create their own path to walk in.

In the beginning of the book Camus shows Meursault’s morals and beliefs and how he as a man processes events in his life, when Meursault’s mother passes away he simply has no reaction and does not seem sad or affected for example Meursault doesn’t want to see his mothers

The novel starts out with Meursault getting a telegram saying that his mother had died. He takes time off work to go to her funeral and completely fail to show the emotion that the reader expects to see of a son towards his recently passed mother. First and foremost, when he arrives, the coffin is

In The Stranger, Albert Camus writes about a detached yet normal man, Meursault, who encounters unusual situations that evidently leads to his demise. From cover to cover, it was established by the author that Meursault had an unusual way of thinking and that he was continuously revealing his peculiar perspective on life and death. Throughout the novel, Meursault is reminded of death and continues to be judged by everyone in the society that he lives in, for instance, when he was put on trial for shooting an Arab man. Camus writes about the main character by describing his absurdist mindset. It is through the focus of funeral scene, however, that Camus is able to formulate the values of the character and the society in which they live in. This scene was able to reveal Meursault’s perspective on life as well as death.

He chooses to observe events to getting precisely attached; one chapter in the book that stood out was the part where Meursault spends a whole day just relaxing on his front porch watching as passers go by in the street. Even though when Meursault is precisely involved in the events, he is incapable of getting caught up in them. When his girlfriend Maria Cardona, asks him to marry her, he tells her that he doesn’t love her but that it makes no difference to him if they get married or not. Even at the point in which he killed the Arab, there was a sense that he wasn’t really there, that he really wasn’t doing what he is doing. It all looked as if he was seeing what was happening than actually killing the

Primarily, Meursault’s aloofness towards the world started to crack after experiencing Maman’s funeral. In the beginning of the novel before the funeral of his mother, Meursault’s desire to “ [see] Maman right away” (Camus, 4) so that he can leave as soon as possible expressed the height of Meursault’s absurdism. Even during the funeral Meursault seemed to care more about “[Perez’s] ruined face”(Camus, 18) than his mother’s casket. However this changed during the sunday after the funeral when Meursault seemed to finally take notice of his mother’s absence from his life stating how his apartment was “just the right size when maman was here”(Camus, 21). This quote is significant because previously Meursault stated “ I didn’t go [to the old