The first thing I remember about reading The Stranger was that I had enormously high levels of identification with Mersault.
The second thing I remember is my friends quoting Mersault and saying, "This is so much like you!"
Mersault sounds a lot like myself. I find that I am compelled to defend him.
Through the character, Camus (sigh!) communicates that being indifferent to the universe because the universe is indifferent to human condition isn't the essence of existence. Fair enough. I buy that.
One can accept the indifference of the universe to one's condition. But how can one sit back and accept the indifference of people? How long can you keep giving yourself to people, and not have them receive you?
If this happens too many times, the ground where you lay yourself bare disappears before your eyes, and there is a deep ravine into which you fall.
Maybe Mersault lost himself the same way. Maybe he was once, if there had been a prequel to The Stranger, a warm, loving, lively person instead of the cold, aloof and distant man we come across in The Stranger. Maybe he tried to reach out to others, tried to give himself to others, but he just wasn't rewarded with so much as a small gesture of acknowledgment that made him feel like what he had given had been seen, heard, touched, felt, understood, cared for. Maybe he was just too fucking tired by the end of it and decided it was better not to give, than to give and lose what you gave. Better to close yourself up, than to fall right through the opening you create. Better not to expect, than to be disappointed. Better to not be fully alive, than to die every time you tried to take a breath of life.
Maybe it wasn't the universe that Mersault turned his back on.
Maybe he turned away from people, because people had never really seen him anyway.
The second thing I remember is my friends quoting Mersault and saying, "This is so much like you!"
Mersault sounds a lot like myself. I find that I am compelled to defend him.
Through the character, Camus (sigh!) communicates that being indifferent to the universe because the universe is indifferent to human condition isn't the essence of existence. Fair enough. I buy that.
One can accept the indifference of the universe to one's condition. But how can one sit back and accept the indifference of people? How long can you keep giving yourself to people, and not have them receive you?
If this happens too many times, the ground where you lay yourself bare disappears before your eyes, and there is a deep ravine into which you fall.
Maybe Mersault lost himself the same way. Maybe he was once, if there had been a prequel to The Stranger, a warm, loving, lively person instead of the cold, aloof and distant man we come across in The Stranger. Maybe he tried to reach out to others, tried to give himself to others, but he just wasn't rewarded with so much as a small gesture of acknowledgment that made him feel like what he had given had been seen, heard, touched, felt, understood, cared for. Maybe he was just too fucking tired by the end of it and decided it was better not to give, than to give and lose what you gave. Better to close yourself up, than to fall right through the opening you create. Better not to expect, than to be disappointed. Better to not be fully alive, than to die every time you tried to take a breath of life.
Maybe it wasn't the universe that Mersault turned his back on.
Maybe he turned away from people, because people had never really seen him anyway.
