Harun, the protagonist of Kamel Daoud’s novel, The Meursault Investigation, and Meursault, the protagonist of Albert Camus’ novel, The Stranger, are strikingly similar people that commit strikingly similar crimes. Harun’s obsession with Meursault leads him to subconsciously mold his life into one so similar to Meursault's that he confuses the two. However, they are ultimately two different men, despite their similar characteristics and experiences, because they are the products of different sets of circumstances.
Both Harun and Meursault are murderers that face absurd consequences for their crimes. It is absurd that Meursault can kill a man but only be condemned to death for not loving his mother properly. It is absurd that Harun kills an innocent man because he and his mother …show more content…
The Arab in The Stranger is just the Arab. Harun points out that “the word ‘Arab’ appears twenty-five times, but not a single name, not once” (Daoud 120). However, the Frenchman is not just the Frenchman. The Frenchman is named Joseph Larquais. Joseph has a grave by the lemon tree in Harun’s mother’s courtyard. Harun knows Joseph. He was a friend of the family that Harun and his mother worked for. Harun’s mother knows Joseph’s “age, his appetite for young girls’ breasts, his work in Hadjout” (Daoud 112), among other things. Camus never graced the murdered Arab man with a name or a grave, but Daoud gave both to the Frenchman, as well as to the Arab, now Musa, whose grave is the sea. Meursault does not know the Arab’s name and thus his victim is not a person, just a dead Arab. In that way, these fundamentally similar murders, and novels, are distinct from one another as a result of the circumstances they originated within. The colonizer may have little care for the colonized, but the colonized is intimately familiar with their
Both Harun and Meursault are murderers that face absurd consequences for their crimes. It is absurd that Meursault can kill a man but only be condemned to death for not loving his mother properly. It is absurd that Harun kills an innocent man because he and his mother …show more content…
The Arab in The Stranger is just the Arab. Harun points out that “the word ‘Arab’ appears twenty-five times, but not a single name, not once” (Daoud 120). However, the Frenchman is not just the Frenchman. The Frenchman is named Joseph Larquais. Joseph has a grave by the lemon tree in Harun’s mother’s courtyard. Harun knows Joseph. He was a friend of the family that Harun and his mother worked for. Harun’s mother knows Joseph’s “age, his appetite for young girls’ breasts, his work in Hadjout” (Daoud 112), among other things. Camus never graced the murdered Arab man with a name or a grave, but Daoud gave both to the Frenchman, as well as to the Arab, now Musa, whose grave is the sea. Meursault does not know the Arab’s name and thus his victim is not a person, just a dead Arab. In that way, these fundamentally similar murders, and novels, are distinct from one another as a result of the circumstances they originated within. The colonizer may have little care for the colonized, but the colonized is intimately familiar with their