Meursault's The Stranger

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.

To juxtapose Meursault’s acceptance, Albert Camus subtly uses light imagery to tie in the prosecutor’s case against Meursault to finally try and find a cause for the crime. When he is giving his speech about Meursault’s crime being “premeditated,” he says, “’First, in the blinding clarity of the facts, and second, in the dim light cast by the mind of this criminal soul” (99). These allusions to light imagery connect the prosecutor’s case to the cause being the

Meursault’s unending days in prison confirms his realization of meaninglessness of life. For Meursault, the days in prison “ended up flowing into one another” seeming endless, symbolizing he was trapped. In prison, he understands where his life is headed and the meaninglessness of life, “For me it was one and the same unending day that was unfolding in my cell and the same thing I was trying to do” (81). This shows how life is same thing over and over again and just a series of events and choices for

After only a few days of trial, the jury in The Stranger declares that the main character, Meursault, is to be executed by guillotine in the town square. The trial and its verdict are one of the important parts of the novel, as Albert Camus uses them as a metaphor to summarize the two main tenets of absurdism. Camus uses the trial and persecution of Meursault to express his belief that the justice system is flawed because of his absurdist ideals that truth does not exist, and human life is precious. In order to reform the justice system, Albert Camus believes that capital punishment needs to be abolished.

The author’s metaphysical format brings together philosophical and religious issues, which are brought out by the use of paradoxes and conceits. For instance, death is compared to as a “slave” that brings the “soul’s

Meursault is truthful to himself and others throughout The Stranger. Unlike most, he doesn’t feel it necessary to lie in order to make others feel better. He is truthful, regardless of whether or not the truth may hurt. For example, in chapter four Marie asked Meursault if he loved her. Instead of lying to her or giving a vague answer Meursault told her that he probably didn’t love her, but it wasn’t important anyway.

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

People are changed by everything around them, even though it might not be who they expect. This is evident in Albert Camus’s novel, The Stranger, written in 1942. It starts out with Meursault who is indifferent about almost everything, including the death of his mother. He attends the funeral with no sadness and ends up going on a date the next day. Some time later he goes to the Mason’s Beach house with Marie and Raymond.

In addition, Meursault’s sensory experience of life, his physical pleasures and in-the-now perspective, is a demonstration of living life to the fullest. The absurdist must live life passionately, putting all of one’s weight into existence by not wasting time or energy on the ethereal or ephemeral. The fact that Meursault does not want to think about religion, even as he awaits execution, shows how the ideal absurdist would live life: loyal to one’s own being until the end – not to a father in the sky, or to an abstract hope. Meaning of one’s life must come from one’s own creative efforts. Meursault’s indifference to spiritual matters – and even sensory matters that are in the distant past and are therefore unimportant to him – is used to emphasize the passion for the present that Camus decided the absurd hero should have. So it is not so much that Meursault is totally indifferent, he is just indifferent to things outside of the now.

In Albert Camus’s The Stranger, Meursault explains how he thinks that life has no meaning to it. He says that “[he] had lived [his] life one way and [he] could just as well have lived it another” (Camus 121). Meursault says this because he does not believe in an afterlife; therefore, it would not matter if he lived his life as a good man or a bad man since he does not believe in heaven or hell. Meursault had no hope all along.

This easy-going, pleasant hedonism is interrupted permanently by Meursault's murder of the Arab on the beach. Not only is he incarcerated, but also he must examine the reality behind the illusion of his trial and, ultimately, of his life. Introspection has not been his metier. It takes him a while to realize that the judge, the jury, the journalists, even his own lawyer, do not wish him well. Meursault finally realizes that he is going to be convicted, not because he killed an Arab but because he did not mourn his mother's death.

In The Stranger, Albert Camus allows the main character to tell the story in order to give the reader an experience of his own. Obviously, with a novel also comes language, which Camus incorporates cleverly as a way to indirectly illustrate Meursault’s thoughts about certain situations. Although the novel represents a postmodern setting, the author shifts the overall meaning. In The Stranger, Camus applies a unique literary style as a power that deflects blame from Meursault, the antiheroic character. In order to disclaim the fault of Meursault, Camus incorporates several instances in which he leaves a greater sense of authority to nonliving objects, while further drawing attention away from the main character. Based on the implication of

The characters of Maude from the movie Harold and Maude written by Colin Higgins and Meursault from The Stranger by Albert Camus, act differently but share the same philosophy towards love, life, and death. The characters differ in the way they go about loving and living. Meursault is passive as he accepts what comes to him, preferring to take a more pliant, dispassionate route. Maude more actively seeks out meaning and joy from her life, preferring to take control of her fate. Both characters die at the end of their respective stories, but they die having believed that they lived fully and without regrets, accepting their end with open arms.

The motif of the journey and the research of the “original”, “primordial” principle is a reoccurring theme present since the birth of the literature. Whether it is Native Americans with the “Trickster” cycle (Velie,1991) or whether it is Goethe inquiring the concept of “Urpflanze”, or the archetypal plant (Davis, R. 2010): Every text seems to add something to this idealistic research, breaking down and putting back together pieces, adopting unusual angles and heterogeneous points of view. Through different methods it is possible to reach different destinations and an analytical observation like the one carried by Herman Melville in Omoo (Melville,1847) will come up with different interpretations compared to the Dionysian and empathetic observation like the one carried by Jack Kerouac in On the Road (Kerouac, 1957). Both the authors, even though with different means, are addressed to the same place, or better, to the same principle that is the “primitive” and the “uncreate” as D.H Lawrence put it (Lawrence, 1923). It is a test-bed where Kerouac chooses the mystical way and