Meursault's Characters In 'The Stranger' By Albert Camus

Upon seeing this tragedy, the Narrator describes that, “the sun seemed to scream an inch above [his] head” (436). The proximity of the heat incites intense emotion among the civilians, including the cop for acting so impulsively and the Invisible Man, who was “walking blindly” yet with his mind “registering it all vividly” (436). The sun blinds him, inhibiting any emotional restriction, yet the sun also clears his mind from obscurity; the heat pulls the Narrator’s emotions out from hibernation and removes them from a dormant stage. In addition, at Clifton’s funeral, the crowd before the Invisible Man is “sun-beaten and

From page fifty-eight to fifty-seven of Albert Camus’s The Stranger he uses the relentless Algerian sun as a motif for the awareness of reality that pursues the main character, Meursault, throughout the passage. When each motif appears in the novel such as this passage, Meursault’s actions change. This exemplifies that the light, heat, and sun trigger him to become debilitated or furious. Albert Camus sets up this motif in the passage to indicate to the reader that this motif shows the major themes of this novel. This motif shows Meursault’s emotion, how the imagery of weaponry affects Meursault’s actions, how the sun is a representation of society, and how the sun weakens Meursault.

In the story, danger is unpredictable, unexpected, it can occur anywhere. By her use of the setting and symbols, the author plays with contrasts and opposition, making the danger and threats appearing slyly, insidiously. To this end, the story is set in a calm little town, on a sunny summer afternoon. Nothing indicates the disturbing turn of event awaiting Connie. All throughout the story, the author refers to the sun which usually symbolizes a positive matter, light as opposed to the definitely dark side of this story’s event. The strongest use of the sun as a symbol comes at the end of the story, when Connie “[moves] into the sunlight where Arnold Friend waited.” (333) Whereas sunlight is supposed to represent some kind of good enlightening the world, Connie follows Arnold to the ultimate danger she will face, leaving in the unknown. The use of setting and the sun as a symbol demonstrate how danger is unpredictable and can happen in any circumstances.

The first ten lines of the poem describe a setting sun and establish the framework in which we are expected to view the monarchy’s fall. Detailing the “glorious” (1) sun’s “double brightness” (4) while he dips below the horizon, Philips portrays the sunset as something both beautiful and terrifying. As the sun “[p]uts on his highest looks in ‘s lowest state” (6), he compels observers to hate him while “ador[ing] his Fall” (8). This section not only characterizes the sun’s shining sunset as a response to his fated end, but evokes the idea of war with words such as “magazine” (as in a magazine of bullets) to refer to the sun’s light (1).

Throughout the play there is a continual reference to light. It is used in the form of bright sunlight,

The mood of the passage when Meursault is alone on the beach is established on the first line, “There was the same dazzling red glare” (Camus 57). Immediately, the sun is placed at the center of attention as it is the origin of the glare that Meursault was referring to. This makes the mood feel arduous due to the intensity of the sun’s “dazzling red glare” in addition to the fact that the sun stays up for a significant period of time during the day (Camus 57). As a result, it creates no expectations that the sun will cease its effect on Meursault soon and a precedent is created that the persistent effect of the sun will have a significant impact on his future decisions.

He characterizes the sun in human characteristics such as old and kind. 12) Wilfred is angry as the sun could wake up the first man, plant, and every type of life form on earth, but it cannot wake or heal the dead comrade now that the world is in chaos and is needed most. As he thinks the earth is sleeping or is using the sun as a metaphor for God. 13) The emotion behind the words Wilfred experienced is truly tragic “O what made fatuous sunbeams toil to break the earth’s sleep at all?

The sweat blinding Meursault enables him from thinking clearly and reflects how powerful the sun is to throw him off of his usual train of thought. All Meursault can think about is the sunlight affecting his body and mood. All he can feel is “cymbals of sunlight crashing on [his] forehead” (59). Camus specifically describes where the particles of sun encounter his main character and how severely it bothers him. Still on the beach, his attention is on the “warm thick film” in his eyes (59). The sun throws off Meursaults’ focus on more than one occasion.

In Albert Camus’ The Stranger, Meursault is seen as a very unique character, but not in a good way. Throughout the novel, he continually fails to show normal human emotions to things like his mother’s death, Marie’s love, and the man he killed. Most people in his town, along with the reader at first, are not able to reason out his actions but as the final events of the novel unfold, the reader begins to see Meursault in a different light.

Although Meursault is the title character and narrator of Albert Camus’ short novel The Stranger, he is also a somewhat flat character. His apparent indifferent demeanor may be a convenience to Camus, who mainly wanted to display his ideas of absurdism. And as a flat character, Meursault is not fully delineated: he lacks deep thought and significant change. His purpose is that of a first-person narrator whose actions embody the absurd, even before he has any awareness of the fact. Since Meursault is embodied absurdism, it is not necessary that he be hyperaware of his thoughts and intentions. His truth has already been built into his character by the

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.

   The Stranger by Albert Camus was published in 1942. The setting of the novel is Algiers where Camus spent his youth in poverty. In many ways the main character, Meursault, is a typical Algerian youth. Like them, and like Camus himself, Meursault was in love with the sun and the sea. His life is devoted to appreciating physical sensations. He seems so devoid of emotion. Something in Meursault's character has appealed primarily to readers since the book's publication. Is he an absurd anti-hero? Is he a moral monster? Is he a rebel against a conventional morality? Critics and readers alike have disputed a variety of approaches to Meursault. I believe he is the embryo

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

distant at his mother’s funeral and he was distant with Marie and he was distant with the

In the beach scene with Meursault, Masson and Raymond, and their fight with the Arabs, Camus’ motif of heat represents tension and foreshadows conflict between the two groups to show that tension leads to conflict and to build suspense. During this scene, the motif of heat specifically symbolizes cultural tension as well as foreshadowing physical conflict. When walking with Masson and Raymond in the beach scene, Meursault noticed that the “the sand was starting to get hot underfoot” (Camus 50) and it was “hard to breathe in the rocky heat rising from the ground” (Camus 50, 52). Camus uses the diction of underfoot to show that the heat is not there yet, but it is about to come. Furthermore, the diction of "rocky heat rising off the ground" shows that the heat is no longer under them, but now something that they are in. By using this kind of diction, Camus shows a transition in the state of heat which parallels the growth in tension in the Pied-Noir of the approaching Arabs. Due to its placement previous to conflict, it shows that tension leads to conflict. Another example of this theme is the inclusion of “the blazing sand looked red to me now” right before Raymond and Masson attack the Arabs with