Stranger than Fiction

The novel The Stranger was written in 1942 by an author from Algeria named Albert Camus. This work has been translated into many different languages after its initial success. The story takes place in the French Algiers and is narrated in first person by a man named Meursault. The storyline begins with him speaking about his mother's death. “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…

The following is an epilogue to Albert Camus’s The Stranger, an existentialist novel where the main character, Meursault, comes face to face with the reality of the Absurd. Being sentenced to death, not because of the murder he committed but because of his radical worldview, Meursault remains true to his belief that there is no God, no meaning, and no hope to the life he lives. Meursault, at the end of the novel, shares his last wish; that at his death, he would have one last bit of…

body without a soul. His pleasures and discomforts are purely tactile and sensory, with no admixture of emotion or spiritual awareness.” Meursault is the narrator and main character of Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger. Looking into the title of the novel deeper, one can refer to “the stranger” as Meursault. Referring to Meursault as a body without a soul is a very accurate description of him. He does not show any emotion to the people around him and his feelings are very different. His feelings…

Pearl is “the scarlet letter, only capable of being loved, and so endowed with a millionfold the power of retribution…” (p64) As a symbol of her sin, Hester dresses up Pearl to look nice just like she does to the scarlet letter itself. This is Hester’s way of overcoming her tribulation, she is, nevertheless, constantly aware of her shortcomings… “Thou must gather thine own sunshine. I have none to give thee!” (p54) As time passes, Hester’s endurance and determination shines through. Many…

Absurdism is a philosophical belief that a human’s life is purposeless because the world is irrational, and the search for the meaning of life would only result in personal chaos. In Albert Camus’s The Stranger, absurdism seems to be the central motif of the novel because it is shown through the symbolism of the heat and the sun and through Meursault’s inability to expressed emotions . The audience finds Meursault acting indifferently towards his mom’s death, being an accomplice to domestic…

‘L’Étranger’ is a novel written by Albert Camus in 1942. The title of this work has an ambiguous meaning which leaves space to open interpretation; it has been translated to English as ‘The Outsider’ or ‘The Stranger’, as the French term ‘étranger’ comprises both these shades of meaning. Meursault, the multifaceted character that Camus chose as the protagonist, can be in fact regarded as an outsider, for he is completely alien to the society he lives in and to a series of social norms which at…

Happiness and hindsight are two pieces of the same puzzle, that is true for just about anyone as it was mentioned time and time again in Stumbling on Happiness, a book that was really great at pointing out the obvious. When reading a book that takes its title from an accident and then proceeds to remind me that everything I perceive can be one giant lie because of falsified memory and a twisted sense of protection, “[one] does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of…

"Texas Forever" is a mantra Tim Riggins, the main character in the television series, Friday Night Lights, lives by. The premise of the show is how an entire town base their dreams on the game of football and we learn those dreams do not come without compromise. It is easy to identify with the characters in Friday Night Lights because their lives and their situations are believable. When we base our life upon a dream or the person we believe we deserve to be, it can be a tragedy or it can be…

essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”. This essay was published in 1942. In this essay Camus described human existence and called it to be “without any purpose: absurd”. Other writers of that era related to his work and subscribed to his work. These writers than wrote their own thoughts on the subject and their writing were named as Theatre of Absurd. There was no such thing as an Absurdist crusade taking specific playwrights fitting in that kind. The Theatre of the Absurd encompassed many miscellaneous…

Once again Meursault in The Stranger provides a striking example. On the one hand, there seems to have been no conscious intention behind his action. Indeed the killing takes place almost as if by accident, with Meursault in a kind of absent-minded daze, distracted by the sun. From…