The Stranger

What do you hold dear in your heart? What are the things that you would consider to be most important in your life? Usually, we as human beings consider ideas such as happiness, peace, love, and freedom as being important. We live, fight, and would die for such concepts. On the other hand, is it possible not to care about such critical aspects of our very existence? Is it necessarily "bad" or evil for a person not to feel as strongly or passionately about these things? Albert Camus', The Stranger, is the portrayal of a man who seemingly just does not care about the world or anything in it, or so is often thought. A good example of this is in the opening pages of the book. Mersault, the protagonist, receives word that his mother as passed away. The first words of the first chapter read: "Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know." It goes on to say that he received a telegram from home that could have been sent late. Just the way he says I don't know, lead me to believe that he is apathetic to most everything. Almost immediately, Mersault reveals himself to be indifferent toward emotion and interaction with others. Instead of grieving at the news of his mother's death, he is cold, detached, and indifferent. When he receives the telegram, his primary concern is figuring out on which day his mother died.

Upon further reading of The Stranger, we learn that Mersault is not fully indifferent about everything. It just seems that way because he is apathetic to things that most people would consider important. In reality, Mersault seems to care deeply about some things. He merely cares about things that other people may consider trite or meaningless. These things include physical attributes rather than emotional ones. Camus writes, "The whole beach, throbbing in the sun, was pressing on my backÐ'... It was this burning, which I couldn't stand anymore, that made me move forward. I knew that it was stupid, that it wouldn't get the sun off me by stepping forward. But I took a step, one step, forward." Mersault is reacting to the extreme environmental factors rather than the emotions that surround it. I believe that most people concentrate on emotion more than physical beauty or satisfaction.

Mersault is a man with some disorder and dysfunction in his life. I view him as a character who has his priorities in life confused. He seems like he is without emotion, feeling, or one thought concerning the "real world." Meursault seems to narrate the events of his life as they occur without interpreting them as a coherent narrative. It becomes clear that Meursault concentrates largely on the moment in which he finds himself, with little reference to past occurrences or future consequences. Meursault's varies his narrations in a way that reveals his attitudes toward the world around him. When he is describing social or emotional situations, his sentences are short, concise statements that offer minimal detail. He tells only the necessary information of what he sees or does. These meager descriptions display Meursault's apathy to society and to the people around him. Meursault's narrative extends much deeper when he talks about topics that directly relate to his physical condition, such as the weather. For example, when describing the effects of the heat when walking on the beach, he employs metaphor, personification, and other literary devices. He describes the sweltering sun, the scorching sand, the broken glass, the crushed shells in the sand, and other aspects of the beach for about three and a half pages in chapter six. "The whole beach, throbbing in the sun, was pressing on my back." "The scorching blade slashed at my eyelashes