The Stranger Literary Analysis

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A lot of people have tried to decide on a meaning of life, one approach is absurdism. Absurdism acknowledges that the meaning of life is too complex for people to understand, so the solution presented is to stop trying to find it. The book "The Stranger" by Albert Camus is one example. It is about a man named Meursault. Following his mother's death--which isn't affected by, he gets into a fight on the beach and kills his coworker's brother for no apparent reason. He is then taken to jail and eventually sentenced to death. Throughout the book he questions the meaning of life and remains apathetic to outside circumstances. The book focuses on the "absurd", which is the conflict between the human disposition to search for meaning in life and…show more content…
No reason for anything is explained. Most prominently, when the murder happens. This is an allegory for the lack of reason in life. At Meursault's trial, he says that he killed the man on the beach "because of the sun". This is as valid a reason as any other. He is as dangerous as any other criminal, if not more because other murderers have a motive--these are avoidable and explainable. Meursault's actions have to reason and no negative effect on him. The murder itself is only there so Camus can illustrate that the story is irrational. How much he questions the meaning of life is minimally effected by the man's death, but more influenced by how people treat him both before and after the…show more content…
He says that the only way to find meaning is to accept that there is no meaning. Existentialism, the belief that the meaning of life is whatever a person thinks it is, is considered too hopeful and foolish for Camus--because believing something is the meaning of life does not make it true any more than believing the sky is green makes the sky green. Camus is wrong in that, and not because of anything philosophical, but because of semantics. It depends on if the meaning of life is absolute or personal, and that cannot be universally decided because meaning is not fact. It is not like the color of the sky, it is like the center of the universe. The universe is unbound, thus every point within it is the center until its limitations are defined. The meaning of life is the same, except for that no matter anyone does, no one will ever know a universal meaning of life. Existentialism focuses on personal meaning, absurdism focuses on absolute

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