Examples Of Alienation In The Outsider

The experience of being an outsider is universal. It is something most of of can relate to and an experience that will probably happen sometime in everyone's lifetime. There are many examples of this in literature.

Meursault's character is the determining factor in his conviction and sentencing. His social rebellion is deemed immoral and abominable. The reader and the novel's characters both try to rationalize Meursault's actions in order to give his life meaning. But according to Meursault, life is meaningless and consequently needs no justification.

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.

Meursault resists being typecast into an archetypal moral category in many of his deeds and actions. Many of his actions in Part One of the novel help contribute to the fuzzy picture of the character. For example,

The answer is simple: it does not relate to the murder of the Arab. Being the representative of society, the jury opposes Meursault and accuses him of not conforming to society's natural ways, and being what we nowadays refer to as the "odd one out". They exclude him from society for his odd clear-cut and sincere demeanor, and for his manifestation of an inexpressive character. Another example is the moment in which the magistrate, a local member of the judiciary having limited jurisdiction, especially in criminal cases, questioned Meursault.

What is an outsider? An outsider is a person who is not excepted by or is isolated by society. Have you ever been an “outsider”? Everyone experiences a situation where they weren’t able to fit in. The feeling of not being able to fit it is universal. Not everyone is the same and in certain situations you may not be able to bond with everyone. Everyone is focused on being judged or being the person who is judging someone. If you are not like everyone in your society group, those people don’t except you. Nowadays our society feels that if you aren’t up to people’s expectations, you are known to be an “outsider”. Being an outsider is universal because not everyone is social, not everyone can afford nice things and not everyone is popular.

In Albert Camus novel, The Stranger (The Outsider), the main character Meursault displays a unique indifference to his surroundings and the world around him. It takes him a degree of time to come to terms with his indifference, but when he does he feels truly free from society's constricting bonds. He leads an apathetic lifestyle that is characterized by his constant lack of a definitive personality. Meursault wanders through life as if in a drunken stupor, living the life of a pleasure seeker. When he accepts his death he is relieved of the pressure of dealing with guilt and with relationships towards other people.

Meursault is an independent and absurd guy who refuses to lie about himself to save his life. At the beginning of the book he avoids conversation and showed existentialism. For example, when the caretaker asked him, why he doesn’t want to see his mother’s body, he just simply said “I don’t know”. Another reason is when he would say, “marriage, no marriage, who cares.” Towards the ending of the book he starts to open up. In order for him to realize how wrong he was, he had to suffer the consequences. Meursault states, “For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone; I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate(2.5.165). “Meaning, he finally has awareness and is open-minded about his life.

In Part 1 of the novel, Meursault does not fully grasp the significance of life because of his absurdist way of life. Camus presents Meursault as a person who does not live life, but reacts to what life presents him. Meursault is incapable of understanding the metaphysics of the world due to his lack of emotions. The greatest understanding of Meursault is through his own mind; instead of being subjective, he is objective. “Behind them, an enormous mother, in a brown silk dress, and the father, a rather frail little man I know by sight” (22). His thoughts include “note-taking” details about his environment with an

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

Meursault was introduced as a young man whom recently found out his mother, Maman, died. He was not the most emotional person, but he dealt with his feelings the best he knew how. Meursault lived his life on the verge of truth and honesty. He was honest within every aspect of life, from women to freedom. He was never certain about anything in life ,but one thing he was sure of, death was inevitable. After murdering an Arab, he was on trial in front of many people being interrogated with many questions about why he did what he did, but also to evaluate his psyche about the situation. Unlike others, Meursault did not hide from the truth and that is what others could not cope with. Living his life the way others were afraid to, Meursault was the outcast in his society.

During the trial, conventional morality is satirized. The Public Prosecutor's convoluted logic equates Meursault's lack of emotion of his mother's death to symbolic matricide and even to actual parricide. As foolish and bizarre as this reasoning is perhaps there is a kernel of truth to it. Meursault has neither parents nor children. He is without a past that he cares about, nor

Although it seems like a heartless and ridiculous response to the subject matter, Meursault's existentialistic honesty makes him heroic. In a way, Meursault loves Marie, but his problem with communication is one of the root cause for his alienation because his response never satisfies the society.

At one point, he declines a job offer to go to Paris. Despite the fact that he'd be able to leave colonial Algeria for Paris, which would seem like a good life choice for many, he doesn't care for the offer. Meursault said that “people never change their lives, that in any case one life was as good as another and that [he] wasn't dissatisfied with [his] here at all” (41). Meursault shows himself not only be indifferent to things or people around him, but that he's also indifferent to his future as everything is the same to him. In his relationship with Marie, Meursault was indifferent to the idea of getting married to her. When asked about marriage and if he really loved Marie, he responded that “it didn't mean anything but that [he] probably didn't love her . . . that it didn't really matter and that if she wanted to, [they] could get married” (ibid). Here he was, saying that he didn't care if he got married. By doing this, he discarded his own ability to decide his future, and instead put it in the hands of someone else. In this respect, Meursault is also like the world, in that his future is decided by others, but unlike the world, Meursault has the ability to decide his future, but never takes the chance, because, like the world, he doesn't care.

In “The Stranger” by Camus, Meursault’s actions throughout the story can be summed up in one word, absurd.