Guilt and Innocence in The Stranger
“Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: ‘Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.’ That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.” (Camus 3) The perplexing tale of Meursault, an emotionally detached and seemingly amoral young man living in Algiers, stands notoriously as the introduction to “the absurd.” Albert Camus coined this school of thought, using The Stranger as a mechanism for expressing his ideas in the novel that has confused, overwhelmed, and disoriented readers for decades since its publication. In Camus’ popular, yet controversial novel, he tells the story of Meursault’s unfortunate lifestyle of apathy. Unaffected by the death of his own mother, Meursault lives on indifferently - until midway through the book, he finds …show more content…
The man is, indeed, a derelict; he has no intellectual life, no love, no friendship, no interest in anyone or faith in anything. His life is limited to physical sensations and to cheap pleasures of modern mass culture” (Girard 528). Meursault serves as a reminder to deeply existentialist, nihilist, or even absurdist philosophers that the consequences of diminishing life ultimately lead to misery: “Indeed, death makes hope absurd” (Bersani 217). A life lived entirely in fear of death is a life wasted. Similarly, absolving all individuals of responsibility for conscious decisions - whether or not these conscious decisions were predetermined - is fallacious, because the average human mind is capable of discerning right and wrong. If the brain consciously deviates from acting in the morally right or socially accepted manner, then the individual freely made this decision. Even the paramount absurdist himself admits: “At any rate, one is always a bit guilty” (Camus
“Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: ‘Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.’ That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.” (Camus 3) The perplexing tale of Meursault, an emotionally detached and seemingly amoral young man living in Algiers, stands notoriously as the introduction to “the absurd.” Albert Camus coined this school of thought, using The Stranger as a mechanism for expressing his ideas in the novel that has confused, overwhelmed, and disoriented readers for decades since its publication. In Camus’ popular, yet controversial novel, he tells the story of Meursault’s unfortunate lifestyle of apathy. Unaffected by the death of his own mother, Meursault lives on indifferently - until midway through the book, he finds …show more content…
The man is, indeed, a derelict; he has no intellectual life, no love, no friendship, no interest in anyone or faith in anything. His life is limited to physical sensations and to cheap pleasures of modern mass culture” (Girard 528). Meursault serves as a reminder to deeply existentialist, nihilist, or even absurdist philosophers that the consequences of diminishing life ultimately lead to misery: “Indeed, death makes hope absurd” (Bersani 217). A life lived entirely in fear of death is a life wasted. Similarly, absolving all individuals of responsibility for conscious decisions - whether or not these conscious decisions were predetermined - is fallacious, because the average human mind is capable of discerning right and wrong. If the brain consciously deviates from acting in the morally right or socially accepted manner, then the individual freely made this decision. Even the paramount absurdist himself admits: “At any rate, one is always a bit guilty” (Camus