The Stranger by William Faulkner

THE STRANGER

"What is it, indeed, the absurd man? The one who, without denying it, does not make anything for the eternal. It is not that the nostalgia is strange to him, but rather he prefers his anger and his reasoning. The first one teaches him to live without appeal and to be satisfied with what he has; the second teaches his limits. Sure of his freedom to term, of his rebellion without future and of his perishable conscience, his adventure continues in the time of its life. The field is in him, his action that subtracts in all opinion except his. A bigger life cannot mean for him another life. That would be dishonest".

The novel The Stranger, based on Sisyphus's Myth, shows clearly Camus existentialist point of view of life and how caught by time, the man cannot forget that the life is not eternal and that the time, of which he does not separate, characterizes the absurdity of the life. From an overwhelming honesty, Camus concludes that all life or thought lacks future. Meursault, the hero of the novel (the problematic individual), tells through his narration that in life nothing really matters and as he lives in an absurd world, in consequence everything is absurd too.

From my point of view, it cannot be clearly observed when Meursault rupture himself from the world because as I see it, by the time of the novel, he had already come apart of the world a long time ago. He is so detached from that world, that not even his mother's death creates a sentiment on him. When he returned home after the burial, it occurred to him that anyway one more Sunday was over that his mother was buried then, that he was going back to work, and that, really, nothing had changed. And it is this detachment from everything about him what leads him to death; he had to died because he was against everything what was consider moral and normal in his society.

Lucien Goldman expresses that the novel is the transfer from society's daily life to literature; it is also characterized by being a degraded search of authentic values in a degraded society. Based on this, I would dare to say that this is an educative novel because I consider that consider Meursault was not looking for anything, he did not care about anything, not even him. That was what made him really problematic and even demoniac for the society around him. His detachment and lack of consciousness was almost considered out of all human nature. For instance, Meursault has difficulty understanding his connection with the case. When the court proceedings begin, he often feels detached and distant from his body and entire self. He wonders about the murderer on trial and suddenly remembers that it is he who is on trial and must deal with the consequences of his actions.

Meursault

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