The Relatable Stranger: How and Why We Are Meursault Essay -- Literary

The Relatable Stranger How and Why We Are MeursaultUsing his existentialist textual matter The Stranger as a vessel for his own philosophical ideals, absurdist Albert Camus poses a question some essential to human existence when released from the shackles of tediously perpetuated social routine, how does a man function? Embodying the answer to this question is Monsieur Meursault, whose once intellectual speech and logical action unravel in the heat of incident to illustrate what Camus deems the nakedness of man faced with the absurd. Possessing the characteristics of any respectable gentleman, Meursault is honest, sensible, and passing adaptable to the universe in motion around him, substituting unmindful(p) rhetoric and the excuse of emotional abundance with an acuity of thought and disposition to raw sensation. By structuring his philosophy around a man with much(prenominal) a nonspecific and thus relatable identity, Camus evokes sympathy by touching at the bestial necessi ty of freedom for the individual, mocked by a society implicated only in docile collectivity.Taking little stock in the unspoken and assumed truths of the culture in which he exists, Meursault follows a more than inbred and almost physiological rhythm of emotion and sensuality. later on attainment of the death of his mother, he must travel about eighty kilometers from Algiers for the funeral (Camus 3). quite an than emphasize the exhaustive capability of trauma, Meursault elicits reason, explaining that it was probably because of all the rushing around, and on top of that the bumpy ride, the smell of gasoline, and the glare of the sky and the road, that he dozed off (Camus 4). After returning home from the funeral, he awakens the next morning and decides to take a swim in the pu... ... indifference of the world (Camus 122). With sympathy toward Meursault secured, a natural disapproval of the society who condemns him is to be formed. By placing a mirror in the beginning the ver y society which this text intends to describe, the novel forces those who read it to reevaluate their plain natural assumptions concerning the frivolous indulgence of emotion, the stone cold immovability of morality, and most of all the purpose of judgment (Camus 40). In his essay on the guillotine, Camus defines kindness as that which does not exclude punishment, but which withholds an ultimate condemnation (Camus 40). With the understructure of such a relatable character as Meursault, Albert Camus attempts to breathe compassion into an other indifferent society, acting as the catalyst for a reaction which some(prenominal) sympathizes and reconsiders what essentially makes us human.