In The Stranger, Albert Camus characterizes Meursault as a man who focuses on smaller aspects of his life rather than the big picture in order to create an inverted moral standard which makes Meursault an outsider in his own life. Meursault finds lying far more terrible than murder, yet he doesn’t judge people based on their previous actions. He helps a man commit an act of violence against a woman, and though he is an accomplice, he feels no guilt. However, Meursault pushes his emotions away, displacing them into a focus on smaller, more physical aspects of his life, such as noises and the weather.
At the beginning of the novel, Meursault never mourns the loss of mother; instead, he focuses on the smaller details in order to lessen the tragedy of Maman’s death. While Meursault is at his mother’s funeral, he never actually mentions any idea of missing his mother or grieving her. Even when he sees her casket, he doesn’t feel the normal emotions associated with seeing a dead loved one: “Varnished, glossy, and oblong, it reminded me of a pencil box” (Camus 14). By associating her casket with a pencil box, Meursault completely displaces any mourning for his mother away from his mind, instead bringing ideas of simple office supplies. Furthermore, the people around Meursault during the wake and funeral do not have any effect on him regarding the death of his mother. Maman’s friends who came to pay their respects only annoy Meursault: “Now it was all these people not making a sound was getting on my nerves” (11). Meursault doesn’t recognize that these people are being quiet to respect Maman’s memory. Additionally, Meursault doesn’t see Monsieur Pérez’s sadness for the loss of his best friend, rather, Meursault only sees him as “an awk...
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By creating a man that goes against society’s idea of a “normal” moral standard, Albert Camus creates a man who was a complete stranger in his world. Most people in Meursault’s time and today have the idea that lying is bad, but it is better than dying as a consequence of one’s actions. However, Camus creates a man that is a complete foil to this idea, and Meursault is made an outsider due to his difference in moral standards, bringing up an idea of the exclusivity of society: does a society only accept those who believe in the same general moral standard as the society as a whole? Meursault lives as an opposite of society’s moral codes, and, because of this, is unable to fight a fair battle in court, ultimately losing his freedom and life.
Works Cited
Camus, Albert. The Stranger. Trans. Matthew Ward. New York: Vintage International,
1988.
The injustices Meursault and Jefferson fight vary in detail but ultimately stem from their deviation from the socially accepted norm. In The Stranger, Meursault does not
In The Stranger by Albert Camus, for the majority of the novel, the protagonist, Meursault, is an emotionless character who has no real relationships. He did not ever take time to visit his mother, and he helps a man beat a woman up. Meursault did not make these choices because he is evil. He behaves this way because he only does things that he wants to do, because he is a nihilist who thinks human existence has no meaning, so he should live in the way that is best for him. But in Chapter Five of Part Two, Meursault changes when he lets all of his inner emotions out, allowing him to see that doing what he wants, and not conforming to what society wants is his purpose, rather than a way to pass time before an inevitable death. Finding this purpose
A man by the name of Thornton Wilder said, “We live in what is, but we find 1,000 ways not to face it,” and to me this quote is saying we live in a world full of tragedies and emotion, but always find a way to stay away from them. In, The Stranger, Meursault suffers from his mother’s death and struggles with finding happiness. This attitude sets up a theme in the story. How he avoids emotions to serious events causes Meursault to think about how a person's life isn’t really important in society. Meursault refuses to think about anything such as fate or God and only believes what he can see. He can only use logic. Whether it is his mother's death, Marie's need to prove her love, or even his killing of the Arab, nothing actually affects his emotions. This quote applies to Meursault because he is a bothered man who can never face his feelings.
Meursault shows very little love or sorrow at the fact of his mother's death. A normal man would feel pain and regret for not being by her side while Meursault does not even care much about the date she passed away. Immediately on the first page in the novel, we confront the situation where Meursault's mother dies, and he does not care about it. "Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. I got a telegram from the home: `Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.' That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday" (3). Meursault does not bother to call back and find information about his mother. Meursault shows no emotion or care for his mother because he sends her away for someone else to take care of her. During the last years of an elder person's life, they are invited to stay with the family in order to become closer with one another. Meursault could care less as he shows no sign of pain, and goes off to do something else. He resembles a figure where an issue as important as death does come as a priority. "We are the hollow men/ We are the stuffed men/ Leaning together/ Headpiece filled with straw" (Lines 1-4).
...able option. Camus’s main character, Meursault, embodies this third option; by accepting his circumstances and being indifferent to them, Meursault is able to break free of all possible causes of anxiety and find happiness. Furthermore, Meursault’s rejection of religion as belief, his acceptance of the “benign indifference of the universe”, and his acceptance of his circumstances all leading to happiness personifies Camus’s take on Absurdism, the philosophy that Camus is trying to depict in The Stranger (76). By using foil characters to contrast Meursault in actions or personality, Camus creates several polarizing situations, making Meursault the extreme epitome of Absurdism in every contrasting relationship and thus, shining light on his ideology in the process.
In Albert Camus’ absurdist novel, The Stranger, Meursault’s detachment from society and his killing of the Arab reveal moral and ethical implications for him and his society. As is common in many absurdist novels, Camus discusses the estrangement - and later development - of an individual in a benign and indifferent universe, one in which conformity prevails. Camus not only satirizes the conformity of society, but religion and the legal system as well. By writing in the first person (from the standpoint of Meursault), he draws in the reader, making the evils of society more prevalent.
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, at his mother's funeral, Meursault does not cry or weep in the typical mourning fashion, but rather sleeps during the vigil and entices one of the other mourners present to smoke a cigarette with him. This would be typically considered "evil" behavior, in the context of the story. He could easily been seen as disrespectful and seditious toward his mother and the established procedures of mourning, which seem to be fairly definite at that era in France. However, this "evil" mold can easily be shaken if one considers that Meursault may be more shaken than anyone else present at the funeral. Considering the other events in the novel, it seems as though he does not have a large capacity for emotion. Based on this, it is not unreasonable to assume that the events leading up to and including his mother's death may have overtaxed his limited scope of emotion, and he was therefore nearly incapable of mourning in the "normal" or expected way for his mother, but rather had to resort to his own, more c...
In the opening of the novel, Meursault receives word that his mother has passed away. While keeping her vigil, he smokes a cigarette. He hesitates at first, because he doesn’t know if he should smoke with his mother right there, but, he says, “I thought about it, it didn’t matter.” He is not sad about her death. Therefore he sees no reason to act as if he is.
Firstly, Camus juxtaposes the stories of Meursault and the Czechoslovakian man to create a presage of the denouement of Meursault. The Czechoslovakian man undergoes major life changes, and this ultimately leads to his demise. He goes to make a better life for himself, and he returns to his village with riches in wealth and in family. Unrecognizable to them, the Czechoslovakian man returns to his mother and sister, and he decides to play a simple joke “of taking a room” and “he had shown off his money” (80). This trick ends when “during the night his mother and sister had beaten him to death…in order to rob him” (80). The Czechoslovakian man’s newfound courage results in obstinacy. Contrastingly, until Meursault commits his crime of murder, his life appears nearly painfully simple. ...
Since he cares little for the affairs of the world, claiming they do not mean anything, then justice—a major concern of the world—also means nothing to him. His actions both before and after his decision to kill a man without provocation demonstrate his apathetic view of the world, and his indifference to justice. Therefore Meursault’s search for justice, culminated by the court’s decision to execute him, remains an example to all of the inability of society to instill justice in criminals. Meursault’s perpetual refusal to acquire a sense of morality and emotion instigates skepticism in all who learn of his story of society’s true ability to instill justice in the
In The Stranger, Camus portrays women as unnecessary beings created purely to serve materialistically and satisfy males through the lack of a deep, meaningful, relationship between Meursault and females. Throughout the text, the main character, Meursault, creates closer, more meaningful relationships with other minor characters in the story. However, in his interactions with females in this book, Meursault’s thoughts and actions center on himself and his physical desires, observations, and feelings, rather than devoting his attention to the actual female. Living in Algiers in the 1960s, Meursault originates from a post-modernist time of the decline in emotion. Meursault simply defies the social expectations and societal ‘rules’, as post-modernists viewed the world. Rather than living as one gear in the ‘machine’ of society, Meursault defies this unwritten law in the lackluster relationships between he and other females, as well as his seemingly blissful eye to society itself. In The Stranger, males, not females, truly bring out the side of Meursault that has the capacity for compassion and a general, mutual feeling relationship. For example, Marie and Meursault’s relationship only demonstrate Meursault’s lack of an emotional appetite for her. Also, with the death of Maman, Meursault remains virtually unchanged in his thoughts and desires.
In Albert Camus' The Stranger, society only affects the main character, Meursault, after he comes to a mid-story crisis. For all practical purposes, Meursault was living in a French society of the 30's, whereas Al...
Meursault is distant from set plans, ambitions, desires, love, and emotions in general. He has a difficult time with emotions such as regret and compassion. The reader sees the nature of his personality in the first few lines of the novel: "Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know." When he hears of the death of his mother through a telegram, he is unattached, and can be considered uncaring.
The most popular topic that people talk about when they discuss “The Stranger” is Albert Camus’s Absurdism. However, associating with history background in 1940s, we can find that “The stranger” satirizes French colonists’ inconsistent behavior, and sympathizes with the native Algerian. Albert Camus uses Meursault’s life as an epitome to reflect the miserable life that Algerian have to express his political opinion implicitly.
Society works according to certain rules. Rules that are not written anywhere but every individual that lives inside society know they exist. It is according to this rules that people act as they do and they feel what they are supposed to feel in certain situations. People are like Marie and Raymond. Though they both know Meursault, they live under the rules of society. Concerning Marie she is a model of...