Critical Analysis Of Albert Camus's

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. His most consistent feelings are fatigue and boredom. Only the chaplain provokes him to a passionate outburst (Showalter 67).
Monsieur Meursault is a young man caught in a situation that is essentially futile and utterly absurd. He suffers alienation from himself and the world. Faith rules many, except Meursault. Faith is a source of pure ambition, the desire to do good, to make all things better – to please God. Because Meursault knows no God, he has no motivation to excel in benevolence, no reason to repent for his sins. His very existence questions the reality of God, the lack of meaning and purpose in life, and the absurdity of everyday existence (Bree 32).
“Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. Throughout the whole absurd life I’d live, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to comes, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living. What did other people’s deaths or a mother’s love matter to me; what did God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we’re all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The other would all be condemned one day. What would it matter if he were accused of murder and then executed because he didn’t cry at his mother’s funeral?” (Camus 121)

He has no fate; or so he believes. After Meursault murders the meddling Arab on the beach in Algiers, he is imprisoned for the crime and ultimately sentenced to decapitation by guillotine in public. During the months he is jailed, Meursault dreams of being free, but he soon accepts that he will be killed with “much efficiency by a shiny guillotine – a precision instrument, perfect and gleaming” (Camus 112). Alth...