The Stranger

The Stranger by Albert Camus In the novel The Stranger, Albert Camus give his expression to his philosophy of the absurd.
A first person account on the life of Meursault from the death of his mother to his execution for the murder of an arab. The central theme of the novel is that the significance of human life is understood only in light of mortality, or the fact of death. Showing Meursault's consciousness change through the course of events, camus shows how facing the possibility of death does not have an effect on one’s perception on life. The novel begins with the death of Meursault’s mother. When attending the funeral, he does not request to see the body of his mother, though he is intrigued about the effects of heat and
Her death had little to no significance to him.
When hearing his neighbor weep over his lost dog (which had died) he thinks of his mother but is unaware of the association he has made. Instead of dwelling on the matter he choses to go to bed. When he is on the beach with Raymond and Masson and they confront two arabs that
Meursault starts to think about the insignificance of action and of human existence. He has a gun and it occurs to him that he could shoot or not shoot and the outcome would be the same. The loss of life would have no significance­no effect on life as a whole and the universe itself is apparently indifferent to everything. Meursault implicitly denies the existence of God and thus denies mortality, as well as the “external” meaning of life and death. Meursault kills one of the arabs in a moment of confusion, partially out of self­defense, but does not regret it even though it means going to prison and, ultimately, being executed. He has this fatalistic feeling that “what’s

done is done,” and later explains that he has never regretted anything because he has always been too absorbed by the present moment or by the immediate future to dwell on the
This awareness is somehow never intense enough to involve self­awareness. That is, he never reflects on the meaning of death for him­until he is in prison awaiting his own execution. The “meaning” of another’s death is quite different from the
“meaning” of one’s own death. With the former, one no longer see that person again, with the latter, ones very consciousness. As far as we know, just ends as a television picture ends when the set is switched off. Death marks all things equal, and equally absurd, death itself is absurd in the sense that reason or the rational mind cannot deal with it. It is a foregone conclusion, yet it remains an unrealized possibility until some indeterminate future time. The “meaning” of is not rational but, again, is existential. It’s implications are to be found not in the actuality of one’s life, the finality of each moment. Before his trial, Meursault passes the time by sleeping, by reading over and over the newspaper story about the (unrelated) murder of Czech, and by recreating a mental picture of his room at home in complete detail, down to the scratches in the furniture. In this connection,