The Stranger (MWDS) By: Valerie stevenson
Short Biography
Albert Camus was born November 7, 1913 in Mondavi, Algeria. Camus was known for his political journalism, novels and essays. He went to the University of Algiers and obtained degrees in philosophy. He wrote The Stranger and The Plague, which both focused on the concept of absurdism. He was awarded the noble peace prize for literature in 1957. Then he died.
The History
During the 1950s the Algerian struggle against France and its white settlers for independence inflamed passions and hatreds in both countries - while a small number of Frenchmen and women helped the Algerian liberation movement in defiance of their government and the sentiments of the majority. What made them do it? The French conquest of Algeria began in 1830. In 1848 Algeria was annexed as three French departments. During the nineteenth century there were two waves of French immigration: post 1848 and post 1881. At the same time Algerians were systematically pauperised. In 1954, French Algeria was a society rigidly polarised along racial lines, economically, politically and culturally. On the one side there were one million French settlers; on the other nine million Algerians.
Plot Summary
Mersault's mother dies. Outwardly an average young man, he shows no grief at the funeral, he seems disconnected from the entire event: people notice. He does not understand himself, his life, or his surroundings: he has no direction and has no judgment or motivation. He sees and hears and touches but he does not properly feel: all things seem outer to him. He cannot connect with his girlfriend, and the man next door is so clearly a dangerous crook, but he is powerless to use his sense and avoid getting tangled up in his affairs. Given a gun, he very unwisely carries it: he gets in a tight spot and shoots a man. He does not know why he did it, it just happened. We feel pity that he is so empty, but strangely he does not pity himself. The police are totally unsympathetic and the courts judge not just his act but his life. He is weighed in the scales and found wanting. His sense of responsibility is so pitifully weak that only thought is that he will not tell a lie to save himself and pretend to feel remorse or play along with the system.
Philosophical Fiction
A work of fiction devoted to a discussion in order to answer questions addressed in philosophy
"I thought he was criticizing me for something and I started to explain. But he cut me off. "You don’t have to justify yourself, my dear boy. I’ve read your mother’s file. You weren’t able to provide for her properly."
Meursault was about to explain why he didn’t love his mother but he got interrupted and confronted with better reasoning.
“Thus, I always began by assuming the worst; my appeal was dismissed. That meant, of course, I was to die. Sooner than others, obviously. 'But,' I reminded myself, 'its common knowledge that life isn't worth living, anyhow.' And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten-- since, in either case, other men will continue living, the world will go on as before. Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably.”
Maybe Meursault really wants to live now that he has found a reason to but he repeats the same thing every day and lives his life in a passive way or for the moment as some might say. So he implying that he might as well just accept his demise.
“Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about. In my prison, when the sky turned red and a new day slipped into my cell, I found out that she was right.”
At this point, Meursault started to appreciate the little thing because of his experience something as simplistic as the daylight.
"It is better to burn than to disappear"
The Setting
The setting of The Stranger is in Algiers, in French Algeria during the 1940s. Africa had been a French colony for almost a century, and the discriminatory attitude of the French toward the Arabs in the book is manifest throughout. For example, Meursault is not sentenced to death over outrage for the murder of the Arab, but rather for his apparent callousness in response to his mother's death. The setting and especially the time are also crucial to the tone of the novel. Camus wasn’t just writing this to talk about absurdity but more likely as a political viewpoint.
It opens with how frustrated that Meursault is that he has to get on a long the train ride for his late mother’s funeral. This is the beginning of the absurdity.
Symbol
The cross- The magistrate waves it in Meursault's face trying to push Christianity on him as if to say that if only you would repent but Camus is trying to express absurdism, which believes that life is meaningless and irrational the whole idea of Christianity and God’s role in people's lives is irrelevant because of its rationalistic viewpoint.
Themes
Religion- Society also turns against Meursault because he doesn't believe in God or the possibility of an afterlife. This attitude leaves him open to the charge that he has no basis to deter him from wrong action; it also leaves him without conventional hope.
Love- Meursault says that he was "fond" of his mother. He loved her the way people love their mothers. He says to Marie that he does not really love her but will marry her if she wants. Love isn't important to him. This may conclude that Meursault is incapable of loving anyone. He never told Marie that he loved her either and tended to ignore her gestures towards him. So what does Camus what us to notice about love?
How does Camus use rhetorical devices to depict the absurdist viewpoint?
