The Stranger - Mersault As The Absurd Man

2 Pages 479 Words

The main character, Mersault, in Albert Camus’ The Stranger, has a detachment
from everything in life. He is a private man who lives by himself in an apartment. Mersault accepts life as it comes and is not dynamic enough to change the ways of the world, a characteristic that aids in classifying him as an “absurd man”. As he said himself, “I’ve always been far too much absorbed in the present of the immediate future to think back”(127). However, Mersault’s realization of his coming death caused a transformation of the character’s perspectives, as the definition of an absurd man indicates.
Mersault reveals much about himself in the opening of the novel when his mother dies. He does not grieve over her loss, and doesn’t cry at her funeral, a factor that would later send him to the guillotine. His present physical condition would contribute to his attitude at that point. At the funeral, he was sleepy and “the sensation of someone posted at my back made me uncomfortable”(7), thus responsible for his sour attitude. At the point and time of the murder, Mersault was feeling hot and miserable from the intense heat, and his physical condition beat his non-existent spiritual conscience that would tell him it was wrong to murder someone. To reiterate the absurdness of his proclivity to not be worried about morals that are important to the rest of society, he even told his attorney that he had no reason to shoot the Arab.
There are times in the novel when Mersault even realizes his own absurdness. During the trial the judge was “brandishing a crucifix before his eyes”(85), yet all he could think about was the stifling hot room and the big flies buzzing around his head. Yet, he says, “I realized it was absurd to feel like this, considering that, after all, it was I who was the criminal”(85).
However, when Mersault learns that he will be decapitated by guillotine he comes to terms with thoughts of hi...