Morality In Albert Camus The Stranger

Meursault’s society uses morality as a way to establish structure in a world that is, according to existentialists, fundamentally irrational. Humans, being mortal and having limited understanding, cannot help but make sense of their world through what they know: boundaries. Civilization has shown that humans have a propensity to change their surroundings to a more favorable, comprehendible environment, and they do so partly by instituting rules. These rules provide a framework for people to fall into and constitute what we consider conventional morality – actions and thoughts deemed socially acceptable, limits on what people should and should not do. Meursault’s society tries to make sense of his seemingly unexplainable murder by fixating on …show more content…
However, the prosecutor claims that Meursault buried “his mother with crime in his heart” (Camus 96), implicating that a man who does not cry at his mother’s funeral is capable of being a murderer. For the most part, people view murderers as heartless monsters, so the rest of society in The Stranger attributes Meursault’s behavior to his callousness. Through these illogical arguments, however, Camus criticizes the societal justice system for its nonsensicality. Despite society’s attempt to reasonably explain Meursault’s crime, the explanations the people concoct are as irrelevant as the murder. Because the prosecutor fails to reference actual evidence relevant to Meursault’s conviction, even Meursault’s lawyer objects that the trial is focusing on Meursault “‘burying his mother…[not] killing a man’” (Camus 96). People have trouble wrapping their minds around the illogicality of the senseless murder and result to their structured set of morals to explain the motivation behind something they do not