Albert Camus"Absurdist Hero"

He takes a mass to the funeral, shargons coffee and cig atomic number 18ttes with the doorman of the rest home his mother was alert in, and decides against having his mother's coffin opened:

While he was going up to the coffin I told him not to trouble.

"Eh? What's that?" he exclaimed. "You don't want me to . . .?"

He put the screwdriver back in his pocket and stared at me. I realized then that I shouldn't have said "No," and it do me feel rather embarrassed (Camus 6).

Camus is foreshadowing Meursault's eventual downf all(prenominal). The calibre fundamentnot feign emotions that he does not have, and, though his responses are authentic, they are frequently contrary to societal convention. He is, above all other characters in the book, fearlessly, brutally h whizst with himself. At the run a risk of offending people and, eventually, at the risk of his life, he is un allow foring to bend to others' expectations of him.

What others in the novel expect from him is an assent to the conventional social order. The world is a place in which mothers are mourned with copious and highly public tears, where romantic love is an positive prerequisite to a happy marriage, where one's friends are of the highest class, and where remorse for ignoring these assumptions is mandatory. Meursault, through with(predicate) his disinterest in such expectations, has made himself a blameless scapegoat. His response to the world, duration eminently reasonable,

Camus, Albert. The Stranger. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. New York:

Certainly Meursault takes many actions and expresses many opinions that appear, seen through the lens of bourgeois society, monstrous. Marie, Meursault's girlfriend, suggests that they get married. The societal expectation is that love ought to be the primary driving force in the relationship, that marriage is a grave and sacred responsibility, and that one approaches marriage with the appropriately impenetrable respect. Meursault, in his casual, disinterested way, rejects these premises. His response to Marie is marked by indifference, though his intentions are not cruel:

Meursault is not being venomed in this passage. He does not intend offense. He is moreover adhering to his own code of behavior.

The reader may be floor at his apparent lack of love, but such a response is anticipated by Camus. it is the same response the prosecutors that Meursault's ladder have. Meursault's inability to love, or even to feign love, contributes to his social isolation: his pariahship. This condition is precisely what defines Meursault as a stranger. He will not imitate what he p[perceives as a theatrical, sour set of behaviors. Because of this, he becomes estranged from others: "Meursault's wrongdoing is not so much from having committed a crime as it is in being, in the sense of theatrical society, a congenital criminal, a criminal "in the soul." This makes a stranger of him (Champigny 15).

Lazere, Donald. The Unique population of Albert Camus. New Haven:

Champigny, Robert J. A Pagan Hero. Trans. Rowe Portis.

Meursault must stimulate this authentic life outside the boundaries of society. Society, after all, rejects him precisely because he is authentic: "Society as Camus portrays it is duplicitous, capricious, and lethal as fate, with one vital difference: fate makes no claim to rationality, while society does make one" (Lazare 161). One of society's claims to rationality can be found in the religious sphere
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