Meursault's Journey

Albert Camus was an award-winning French author who expressed his absurdist views on the meaning of life and the purpose of humans in his esteemed novels, especially his 1942 classic The Stranger. The Stranger demonstrates Camus’ absurdist beliefs, sending a message to the world that life is meaningless and that personal values deserve to be defended. In this novel, Camus’ character of Meursault is the “stranger” that the title refers to because he is greatly misunderstood by his society due to his differing beliefs. Meursault narrates The Stranger, and his voice sets an indifferent tone in the novel. He is an absurd character who, much like Camus, challenges the expectations and normality of his society. Camus created Meursault in order …show more content…
Camus deliberately placed Meursault’s transition in the final paragraph of The Stranger, and the actual transition occurs in the final moments of Meursault’s life. Meursault is the narrator of the novel, so the reader is directly exposed to his thoughts and actions in daily life and then must transition his or her mind as well, in order to understand Meursault’s transformed state of mind before his death. Camus took the reader on Meursault’s journey with him in order to show the reader the importance of this transition and to emphasize his belief, and a main theme of the novel, that people should be willing to die for their personal beliefs instead of living under societal standards that they do not agree with it. At the end of his life, Meursault needed to hear the large crowd “greet” him with “cries of hate” in order to connect to society and to be assured that he was dying for the right cause (123). The use of the word “greet” demonstrates how society’s hatred will welcome Meursault to his death. Meursault realized that the only thing he lived for was to challenge society; therefore, the people’s hatred honored the success of his life purpose and allowed him to happily complete his