Seminar Paper- The Outsider

Seminar Paper: The Outsider

Albert Camus was a famous French Algerian author, philosopher and journalist. Camus was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times".[2] He was the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, after Rudyard Kipling, and the first African-born writer to receive the award.[3] He is the shortest-lived of any Nobel literature laureate to date, having died in an automobile accident just over two years after receiving the award. He was often referred to as an existentialist, although he rejected these claims. His particular philosophical views helped give rise to absurdism, which you can see in one of his most famous pieces The Stranger. In my seminar paper I will be looking carefully at The Stranger, also known as The Outsider, to find Camus’ philosophical views on the world. He seems to reject hope but rejoices at the end showing his absurdist views, “He understood with Nietzsche that repetition, starting over again until death, is the supreme test of the absurd”. Camus as a writer rejects Nietzsche because he is a ‘Romantic’, so in ‘The Stranger’ he comes up with a non-romantic existentialist hero to counter attack the standard romantic heroes.
The book is split into two parts, part one starts with Meursault finding out about his mothers death. Straight away in the book you see that Camus wants to shock his reader with the pure bluntness of his character, Meursault. “Mama 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”, you can see from the calm way he talks of finding out about his mothers death that he is an absurd man. The funeral goes by with Meursault acting in a way that is completely bizarre to most people; he doesn’t seem to feel any sadness or guilt over his mother’s death. Camus writes using the character as someone who sees rather than feels. It is written from a person’s perspective but misses the links between feelings and facts that ‘normal’ people would connect together. Quoted ‘The World of the Man Condemned to Death’ by Rachel Bespaloff, “supposes a narrator who arranges past events according to the meaning he confers upon them-whereas here, precisely the meaning is lacking. He has become a stranger to his own life.” She believes that Camus wanted to write using a character that doesn’t express him; he let the character see the facts and issues but didn’t let his own thoughts come into the book. His readers will make the connection that the man has no feelings leaving the audience with mixed emotions.

Meursault’s interaction with people is also uncanny; he makes no real effort to be connected with anyone although enjoying their company. He doesn’t seem to understand how people make the bond with someone else he believes in the individual. The individual to him stays individual not allowing other people’s influences block his own. Even the girl he is dating, he doesn’t make the connection with, and Marie to him is just there, he doesn’t believe in love or that people belong with one another. This is a view Camus holds writing in ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, “It is only on the basis of a collective way of seeing, for which books and legends are responsible, that we give the name love to what binds us to certain human beings.” Meursault clearly doesn’t believe that two people can be bonded as one. This lack of emotion to even someone he has been dating baffles people because of the obscure relationships he forms. Meursault also doesn’t care much about the types of people he talks to, Raymond the apparent pimp, becomes friends although Meursault doesn’t really mind either way if they are or not. Camus writes using only facts so the reader continuously gets the logical view of what’s happening which makes sense when you put it down in a blunt fashion. However the logical, for most, is always twisted because of the emotions involve, if you look at the feelings that should be scattered around in this book it would have a completely different meaning and probably even ending. Camus wanted to take the audience away from this to show them how to just see.

Meursault lives very much in the present, in the whole book he doesn’t look at the past but just what is happening to him then and in the immediate future. He has no time for thinking about what happened or what could have happened. He is free from any guilt, even in his moments in court and in prison; he doesn’t think of what he should have done or show any remorse for his actions. He also doesn’t think of the future, having no dread, he goes back to the same spot where the Arabs had been but doesn’t think of the consequences if he does this. This character has the many characteristics of an existentialist, as he doesn’t dread the future and seems not to have a past or else doesn’t feel guilty about the past. His existence in the present is all that matters to Meursault. His life in Part one is seemingly content, he doesn’t do much going about his existence in a slow moving way. You can tell that he is interested in the human existence; he follows the ‘robot woman’ as if he were researching an animal. He finds the way Solomon, Raymond and even Marie think to be unimportant, he answers their questions or befriends them because they want him to rather than he actually cares. In Part two he does this also with the chaplain and the prison guards, he studies their behaviour at first but then gets bored by their existence. To him the people are there to fill his time, but eventually he gets bored and moves onto something else. In the courtroom he himself looks at all the faces and notes what he sees; only after the prosecutor has examined him he notices that all the people seem to loathe him. This bothers Meursault at first but after a while he starts to get bored of the proceedings and goes into his shell once again.

The way Meursault views the world is out of the ordinary, quote from An Explication of ‘The Stranger’ by Jean-Paul Sartre, “The ‘absurd’ man is the man who does not hesitate to draw the inevitable conclusions from a fundamental absurdity”. The way Meursault thinks about situations and the logical truth he brings out emphasises the strange character he is meant to be. Raymond asks him to write a letter luring the woman to go round, even though he knows that Raymond wants to hurt her. His argument is that he sees Raymond’s point that she ‘did him wrong’. When the fight breaks off and everyone else is scared for the girl he feels no sympathy and wants to carry on with his night because it’s not his business. Solomon, is another key example as he treats his dog with pure malice, the neighbours all believe this to be a shocking thing but yet again Meursault doesn’t want to meddle in people’s business, or should I say doesn’t care about other people’s business. The guilt and shame Solomon feels after he loses the dog is evident from the interaction we see between Meursault and himself, this is the ‘normal’ way people would react.

Meursault as a character speaks very little which Camus believed in, he states in “The Myth of Sisyphus”, “A man’s virility lies more in what he keeps to himself than in what he says.” Making his character have very little speech, you see there can be a lot more taken from what he doesn’t say. Camus takes this idea from Heidegger as he declares, “silence, is the authentic mode of speech”.

The last chapter when the chaplain goes to Meursault in one last attempt for him to see God, Meursault goes into a fit of rage. This last part of the story, you finally see the real essence the existentialist view on life. The rejection of God, humans are condemned from birth to die so God has no importance in life. The idea that the body and soul have no connection, they believe that once they are dead the ideas stop and that’s it. So he argues, why, not do what you want in life? Live for the present because the future is filled with dread of death, the past filled with guilt. He states to the Chaplain if he even knows if he is alive because he is not living in the present, always worrying about the afterlife.

After this he starts to think himself about how he lived his life in the last paragraph. He sees that people don’t make any difference to him, they have no influence or hold over him, and so all his decisions were his own. So in theory he would make the same decisions as he had already made because they were his own. Being sentenced to death he realises he is happy and content with his life, other prisoners facing the same fate are unhappy because of the outside influence. They feel guilt about their past, so dread their condemned future, being influenced but the chaplain they now believe in God and their afterlife, all of this makes them feel sick in the present. Meursault re-looks on his life and realises he has been happy and still is happy so then life to him is worth re-living. Quote by Rachel Bespaloff, “A book without hope, or rather against hope, it ends on a promise”.