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Existential themes in the stranger
What does meursault realize at the end of the stranger
Existential themes in the stranger
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Efforts to engage Meursault in secular structures of meaning are equally futile. When Meursault's boss offers Meursault a position in Paris, he expects Meursault to embrace the opportunity for career advancement. Meursault, though, lacks all ambition and turns down the boss' offer without considering it. As a student, Meursault recalls, "I had lots of ambitions…But when I had to give up my studies I learned very quickly that none of it really mattered." When Marie asks Meursault whether he wants to marry her, she expects him to take the institution of marriage seriously. Yet Meursault is indifferent towards it, thinks "it didn't mean anything" to love a person, and agrees to marry Marie simply because she wants to marry him. Though he grows fond of her, he doesn't cultivate any attachment to her more meaningful than superficial attraction. Throughout his trial, Meursault is equally bemused by the meaninglessness of the justice system and finds its attempts to impose rational, meaningful structure on his actions ridiculous. He considers the guilty verdict he eventually receives entirely arbitrary, and describes its "certainty" as "arrogant."
Meursault's unwavering nihilism frustrates those
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Absurdism holds that the world is absurd and that looking for order or meaning of any kind is a futile endeavor. Humans must accept the absolute indifference of the world towards human life. Ironically, it is only the thought of imminent death that leads Meursault to acknowledge anything like meaning or importance in life. Though he still spurns the notion of essential meaning, Meursault's impending execution fills him with an overwhelming, heart-felt desire for life that contradicts his stated goal of being "level-headed" and considering life and death as equal
Meursault is an amoral person. He does not think about the choices he makes, but instead he tries to please people that interests him. He was committed to his actions and did not back out on any of them. He didn’t have second thoughts of what he has done. He has helped a thug.(add more here). He has killed an Arab and goes to jail for it. He says, “At first, I didn’t take him seriously. I was led into a curtained room; there was a single lamp on his desk which was shining on a chair where he had me sit while he remained standing in the shadows. I had read descriptions of scenes like this in books and it all seemed like a game to me”(Camus 78). Meursault does not take the interview seriously. He believes he has done nothing wrong. It proves difficult for him to view himself as a criminal because he truly believes in the simplicity of this case---he was at the wrong place at the wrong time, and it was all a matter of absurd luck. He does not believe there is a God in this world. He is now sentenced with the death penalty. Before he died he says, “As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish
Life has been defined as the property or quality that distinguishes living organisms from dead organisms and inanimate matter, manifested in functions such as metabolism, growth, reproduction, and response to stimuli or adaptation to the environment originating from within the organism. Further, that very definition from the Webster's dictionary says nothing when it comes to the everyday experiences one faces throughout a lifetime. The experiences one faces makes, breaks, and shapes us into how we act and live. T.S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men" portrays a world in which humans lack connections to each other and to G-d. Similarly, the main character, Meursault, from the short novel The Stranger, by Albert Camus, represents a man who does not feel any condition to anyone or anything. Meursault seems not to have a sense of emotion for the occurring actions in his life, and as a result, Camus pictures him as a senseless man. Many people in society go through life-breaking crisis that takes them several weeks even months to get over, meanwhile Meursault goes through some of the most immense problems during his life, yet he shows little emotion to ward his reality.
One of the main points stressed in the stranger is that people have no meaning to life. It is stressed that all lives will come to an end guaranteed and that all of their actions are meaningless. This expresses that he believes that all life is equally meaningless. Late in the story after a dispute with the chaplain is when Meursault realizes this. He notices that just as he had no effect to the world the world had no effect on him. He was going to die anyways just like everyone else. He was born and will die with no importance to the world and so will everyone else.
In Part One of The Stranger, Albert Camus avoids religious confrontations with Meursault in order to subconsciously place blame on Christ for his criminal actions. Camus restricts Meursault’s relationships to further distance him from his mother. Meursault then alienates himself from the typical spiritual ceremonies and actions to demonstrate his distrust of religion. Simultaneously, Camus uses diction of clear and bright elements to characterize people in the novel, excluding Meursault. Camus associates dark colors with Meursault to depict a sadistic persona. To conclude, Camus places Meursault in recurring situations which result in him being distracted by “the light”. Camus uses these literary techniques in The Stranger to demonstrate man’s condemnation of God.
Meursault as Christ in The Stranger (The Outsider) In one of his later interviews, Camus made the somewhat irritated comment that Meursault is the “only Christ we deserve.” While this seems to be a pithy, witty comment, we need to figure out how Meursault is like Christ. Christ taught his disciples and had them go and teach others, yet Meursault has no disciples and chooses to say little. Meursault murders while Christ brings a man back from the dead.
The Stranger begins with an Algerian man named Meursault. Meursault is informed by ways of telegraph, that his mother has died. After hearing this information he travels to Marengo, to visit his mother's past home. When he arrives, after sleeping the whole trip, he is greeted by the director of the old folk's home. The director asks him if he would like to see his mother, but Meursault declines. That evening, he takes part in his mother’s vigil in the retirement home and the following day a funeral takes place. During each of the religious ceremonies, Meursault displays little to no remorse. Throughout the vigil: he smokes a cig, drinks some coffee the director gave him, and falls asleep a number of times. At the funeral service in the nearby village he displays himself as a very inconvenienced, burdened disposition. He talks of his annoyance with the scorching sun and focuses more on the funerals attendants, than showing remorse for his dead mother. The very next day, Meursault goes to a public beach. There he stumbles upon Marie Cardona, a previous co-worker and acquaintance. Later...
When it comes to love, Meursault has an outlook that is very different from most. He believes that love “doesn 't mean anything but that [he] didn 't think” (35) he loved Marie. She becomes very sad by this and thinks that he doesn 't care about her at all. She doesn 't realize that Meursault is not like others, he has no views on the topic of love and does not label his feelings. Later on, Marie asks him if he will marry her. He replied that “it [doesn 't] make any difference to him and that [they] could if she wanted to” (41). He says he will marry her just to please her, by doing what she wants, he is conforming and doing what others want him to do. He is not doing anything to create himself, and goes with the flow of what others expect.
Throughout the text, Meursault uses Marie simply as a means to an end to satisfy his own ambitions, without very much regard to her own inner feelings and aspirations. “That evening Marie came by to see me and asked me if I wanted to marry her. I said it didn’t make any difference to me and that we could if she wanted to. Then she wanted to know if I loved her. I answered the same way I had t...
The Stranger by Albert Camus was written in 1942. The main character Meursault is indifferent and absurd, and chooses to live day by day. In this novel, Meursault commits a murder by killing an Arab and did not have any further investigation on the crime. However, Kamel Daoud an Algerian writer decided to write a response to Camus’ book called The Meursault Investigation. This novel is about the victim’s brother that was killed in The Stranger by Meursault. Haroun tells his own version of the story from an Arab’s point of view by giving an homage to his brother Moussa. Dead Man’s Share is a detective novel, but also a political novel announcing the excesses of an authoritarian regime. The author also demonstrates his commitment and his affection
When asked if he believes in God during his trial he says no. This causes an uproar in people’s opinions of him and they think he is crazy. But people failed to see he is a person who practices absurdism. An absurdist believes that religion is a social construct made to give meaning to something senseless. This is interesting coming from a man who lives in France. The most practiced religion in this area is Christianity. It’s also not that Meursault hates religion, but he doesn’t like it forced upon him. When he gets put in a cell with the, Chaplain he tells the man he is living the life of a dead man. He refuses to spend his last minutes before death on God. Meursault conveys an atheist persona, and in this French culture it appears as though he has a bad personality. Once he says he does not believe in God, people do not see him as a sane man anymore and push him more on the guilty
The trial and conviction of Meursault represents the main ideals of absurdism, that truth does not exist, and life is precious. The trial is used to portray the jury’s attempt to place a proper verdict on Meursault as mankind’s attempt to find order in an irrational universe. Camus believed these attempts were absurd, because there is no real truth in the world. The entire trial is then just an example of absurdity.
The trial portrays the absurdist ideal that absolute truth does not exist. This ideal destroys the very purpose of the trial, which seeks to place a rational explanation on Meursault’s senseless killing of the Arab. However, because there is no rational explanation for Meursault’s murder, the defense and prosecution merely end up constructing their own explanations. They each declare their statements to be the truth, but are all based on false assumptions. The prosecution itself is viewed as absurd. The prosecutor tries to persuade the jury that Meursault has no feelings or morals by asking Perez if “he had at least seen [Meursault] cry” (91). The prosecutor then continues to turn the crowd against Meursault when he asks him about his “liaison” with Marie right after his mother’s death. Though Meursault’s relationship with Marie and his lack of emotions at his mother’s funeral may seem unrelated to his murder, the prosecutor still manages to convince the crowd that they are connected to one another. The jury ends up convicting Meursault not because he killed a man, but because he didn't show the proper emotions after his mother ...
The idea of absurd is presented to the reader once more as Meursault finds comfort in his death for it indicates that there is no need to wait for heaven since life is the only thing that holds value. From this epiphany he becomes content with the absurd and would live his life over again, not wanting to change a thing as he has proved to himself he led a free life and is happy to depart the world which gave him confliction but freedom. Similarly, in Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Sisyphus’ passion for life results in him to be condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up and down a hill for eternity, this myth is futile because there is no ending and the character is conscious. In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus writes, “ [When] Sisyphus watches the stone in a few moments whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit.[...] For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his
It is often said that being different and not conforming to all of society's expectations can be beneficial. However, Meursault is seen as an outsider by defying the French and Christian values that he is supposed to embody. How does his non conformist attitude and irrational thoughts affect his ability to interact with other characters? Would his perspective on the meaningless of life be changed if he had decided to marry Marie? If so, how?
“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.” said Albert Camus, philosopher and author of the novel The Stranger. The Stranger follows a French man named Meursault living in Algeria, his surroundings, and the series of events that ultimately leads to Meursault’s murder conviction. The Stranger illustrates a philosophy called absurdism, which refers to the belief that human tendency is to seek meaning and value in one’s life, despite the fact there is no meaning in life. Although The Stranger fixates on Meursault as an absurd hero, it is really Salamano and his relationship with his dog that truly reveals the absurdity of life.