It follows the life of Meursault, a French Algerian whose apathetic responses to life get him in trouble socially and eventually get him killed. All I could hear was the blood pounding in my ears. What does not work well is looking for motivation at the surface level of the text. Meursault expresses a tenet of existentialism here: Each individual possesses only the present moment in which to act. However, Meursault makes it clear that such criticism doesn’t bother him at all. The entire story is told from a first-person perspective, i.e. When he shot the Arab four more times, it was his attempt at feeling misery, or unhappiness. What one should check when re writing bash conditions for sh or ash? He will soon hear the Prosecutor say that, unlike normal men, he has no soul. When I look into a man's face ... all I see is a monster. He attends the funeral and shows no remorse during it, but he complains about how hot it is. Character is difficult to judge. When Meursault kills an Arab, nothing happens to him. These are examples of not playing by the normal social rules: he does not want to feign grief when he doesn't feel any. The language used in this passage is so elaborate and rich in simile – “The steel… was like a long, flashing sword,” for example – almost detaches the act from Meursault and causes the reader to question whether he did it with intent or not: “That’s when everything began to reel. The conversation prompts Meursault to admit to the reader that he seldom visited his mother in the last year as he found it an inconvenient waste of his day off. Did Proto-Indo-European put the adjective before or behind the noun? (This reading puts the prosecutor's claim that Meursault had "morally killed" his mother in a different light than the previous interpretation.). Moreover, if I recall rightly Camus insisted that he was not an existentialist - at least in Sartre's mould. Rather than decide whether he is guilty of murder, the prosecutor seeks to prove how Meursault is an unloving and uncaring individual, that he has 'no soul.' Meursault kills the Arab in cold blood, gets tossed into jail, and awaits his trial for a year or so. Why can't I move files from my Ubuntu desktop to other folders? We are given very little information why Meursault is on the outside of society - Camus does not care to give us a back-story. Perhaps one of the most valuable ways to understand Meursault is to quote what Camus has said about him: "Meursault for me," writes Camus, is "a poor and naked man, in love with the sun which leaves no shadows. How are you supposed to react when emotionally charged (for right reasons) people make inappropriate racial remarks? I stood there, motionless." The presence of the Arab disturbed him. What sort of work environment would require both an electronic engineer and an anthropologist? No matter how you look at it, there is not a reasonable explanation for Meursault's actions. This charming guy shoots and kills a man, Johnny Cash-style, just to watch him die. Show activity on this post. Yet none of this is apparent in the text. But when I got nearer, I saw that Raymond's Arab had come back. In that case, they can reform their feeling of loss and the process of mourning ends with a kind of acceptance. Or a person in mourning feels their pain in an internal way; it is felt in the unconscious only, where the person is not aware of it. Whatever happens, it doesn't matter. (For example, during his first conversation with the investigating magistrate in Part Two, Chapter I, the magistrate asks him whether he had loved his mother. Meursault describes his and Marie’s responses after they witness Raymond beating the Moor woman who has been unfaithful to him. As soon as he saw me, he sat up lightly and put his hand in his pocket. site design / logo © 2021 Stack Exchange Inc; user contributions licensed under cc by-sa. The murder came as a shock - here we are looking at the life of an absurd man. The murder of the Arab was what Meursault was on the beach to accomplish in the first place. There are two main approaches to finding an explanation to the killing of the Arab. It is with his gun that Meursault kills the brother. At two o’clock on a sunny afternoon, Meursault kills an unnamed Arab. And this time, without sitting up, the Arab drew his knife and held it out towards me in the sun... All I could feel were the cymbals the sun was clashing against my forehead and, indistinctly, the dazzling spear still leaping up off the knife in front of me. His final peace is the "benign indifference" of the universe. Nightmare Stage Meursault has been in prison for a year and is found guilty of murder. Meursault was undoubtedly under the sun, and it was affecting him. Well, that is what the book is about. From this point of view, the killing of the Arab is a roundabout way of committing suicide, using the justice system as an instrument. Meursault even acknowledges that he doesn't have to kill "the Arab". Meursault feels none of the same emotion. When he does shoot "the Arab", he notes that "each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing.". It only takes a minute to sign up. Meursault repeatedly reveals a lack of a sense of reality. You see, this novel is largely about existentialism. The existential interpretation here is wrong. rev 2021.1.8.38287, The best answers are voted up and rise to the top, Literature Stack Exchange works best with JavaScript enabled, Start here for a quick overview of the site, Detailed answers to any questions you might have, Discuss the workings and policies of this site, Learn more about Stack Overflow the company, Learn more about hiring developers or posting ads with us. He was alone. more about it. As mentioned above, Meursault tells his story with a kind of outsider's objectivity. The “absurd” refers to the feeling man experiences when he tries to find or fabricate order in an irrational universe. From this point of view, as I already mentioned in my discussion of the Czechoslovak traveller's story, Meursault is put on trial for refusing to lie and not playing by society's conventional rules. The trigger gave, I felt the underside of the polished butt and it was there, in that sharp but deafening noise, that it all started. What is Meursault's problem with the heat? Likening the day to the day of the funeral summons death into the scene right before Meursault shoots. Meursualt is accused of "morally killing" his own mother; during his closing speech, the prosecutor even claims Meursault is also guilty of killing his father. as literature The Stranger is naturalism. At the end of a normal mourning process, the mourner eventually prefers himself over the lost "object"; at the end of a pathological process, the mourner is unable to give up the lost "object", ascribe the lost to himself and decides to share its fate (see Freud's Mourning and Melancholia). This passage is also interesting. Sights, smells, and motion combine to cause a change in consciousness that he can neither identify nor understand. In the novel The Stranger by Albert Camus, Meursault realizes that death is a subject that cannot be erased. Several early critics have commented on this, for example Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Blanchot and Claude-Edmonde Magny. The concepts of past and future are essentially irrelevant to meaning. Some critics have claimed that Meursault is a victim of society, and others have even claimed that he’s a type of hero. The day after he Another way of approaching Meursault's "motivation" to kill the Arab is provided by psychoanalysis. It comes through the naturalism. Meursault thought that these attempts at emotion were good enough for the world to consider him a normal person. Why is the tense wrong in the beginning of The Stranger? However, readers learn that while he notices sensual details, he fails to notice human emotions. You see this most notably in his trial, where he shows remorse, and is ultimately convicted not because he committed the murder, but because he doesn't live up to what society wishes. 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