The Stranger Research Paper

In The Stranger, Camus’ treatment of nature demonstrates how he sees nature as unrelated to and uninterested in human activity. In the text of The Stranger, Mersault tells the reader, a woman at his mother’s funeral reported “If you go too slowly there's the risk of a heatstroke. But, if you go too fast, you perspire, and the cold air in the church gives you a chill." I saw her point; either way one was in for it.” (Camus 16) This statement comes early in the text and is part of setting up the action. In it, Camus shows the reader how nature goes on unrelated to human activity by implying Mother Nature simply is what she is. Human beings have their ways and, due to the choices we make based on our environment, we may have good or bad outcomes, but those choices are still our own and nature cannot be measured by those outcomes. Meursault’s decision to walk slow and get heatstroke or fast and perspire is merely his decision to interact with nature one way or another. No matter what he does or how he refers to nature, the sun and its heat is just being what it is.
As the story moves along Meursault describes how he is actively pushing back, hard against nature and yet nature is still unchanged. “The sun and its intense light “pressed itself on me, trying to check my progress. And each time I felt a hot blast strike my
He spent his childhood living in a small three-bedroom apartment, with no electricity or running water, in a working class suburb of Algiers. The apartment had no electricity or running water and was ruled by the authoritarian hand of his maternal grandmother, a woman who was severe, sporadically even brutal, and disposed to melodramatics. The family living under her roof in the small apartment was her daughter Catherine and two sons Joseph and Etienne as well as Catherine's sons, Lucien and