The Stranger

Society has a series of boundaries and "ways of acting" for any given situation. The Stranger by Albert Camus demonstrates how society judges individuals for doing something that is not the normal way to do things. Meursault displays many of these abnormal personality traits. He is not an emotional person and has a laid back attitude. Unfortunately people judge him because he does things and sees things differently than most others do. However, is he really that different? If he does not show emotion, does this mean he feels no emotion? Perhaps he is just acting the way he feels most comfortable, or he may be afraid to show how he really feels. The Stranger forces one to read between, and even through, the lines in a search for understanding. Camus' story can allow the reader to interpret his or her own meaning of the book, but one comes to see that deciphering the text leads to the true Meursault.

The reader’s first glimpse of Meursault’s lack of feeling or emotion comes within the first page of the book. When he asks his boss for the two days off he says, “I even said, it’s not my fault”. This shows he may have feel guilty about his mother’s death. Perhaps he felt guilty for putting her in the old age home, or maybe because he never really went to visit her, or even because they did not have a close relationship. Any of these things could give him a guilty conscience. He wanted someone to tell him it really wasn’t his mistake to send her to the home for the elderly. People often feel guilty if they have to put loved ones in a home, whether they were forced to or not. Plus the fact that he never visited Maman once she was there. If he was too afraid of confronting her to visit her, surely he would be anxious about going to her funeral. He may have had doubts about whether he made the right decision to put her there in the first place. He knows that “the first few days she was at the home she cried a lot”. Meursault must have felt guilty knowing this. This is why he could not bare the thought of looking at Maman in the casket. Not because he did not love her of because he did not care, he was afraid to see her because he felt he let her down.

Is it so astonishing to think someone does not cry at a funeral? Some people are frightened to show how they really feel, some may not realize the gravity of the situation until much later, and some may have been prepared to face the death of a loved one, especially the elderly. Meursault may fit into each of these categories. He rarely shows any emotion externally through the entire book. He may not actually have come to terms with his mother’s death, and he could have known that she was getting older and would pass on soon. Any of these reasons could cause a person to appear mentally detached from the death of a loved one.

Marie often questions Meursault about love. She, for no apparent reason, loves Meursault. When asked if