Dustin's review
status:
Read in February, 2008
The narrator, Meursault, is a fascinating character in that he has an incredible sense of material resignation about him. He absolutely rejects all concepts of importance to the absurd trivialities of life while at the same time living with such simple pleasure that one can't help but smirk reading the descriptions in the first half of the book.
His indifference to the way he is perceived leads him to a very level-headed but unsympathetic countenance regarding his friends and acquaintances. The terrible irony of his character is that he rejects the false certainty of religious sentiment and other such realms of impossibly dubious nature, rejects them along with an understanding and statement of love (which he continually denies to Marie, his girlfriend, who asks him if he loves her periodically), along with material possession and the "bitch goddess" success (he turns down a promotion for "no reason" whatever), Meursault rejects all these common sentiments and yet...more
The narrator, Meursault, is a fascinating character in that he has an incredible sense of material resignation about him. He absolutely rejects all concepts of importance to the absurd trivialities of life while at the same time living with such simple pleasure that one can't help but smirk reading the descriptions in the first half of the book.
His indifference to the way he is perceived leads him to a very level-headed but unsympathetic countenance regarding his friends and acquaintances. The terrible irony of his character is that he rejects the false certainty of religious sentiment and other such realms of impossibly dubious nature, rejects them along with an understanding and statement of love (which he continually denies to Marie, his girlfriend, who asks him if he loves her periodically), along with material possession and the "bitch goddess" success (he turns down a promotion for "no reason" whatever), Meursault rejects all these common sentiments and yet replaces them with nothing, nothingness, in fact.
He constantly flees from all manifestations of false knowledge, finding them arbitrary. The trial following his murder of an Arab resulted in the victor of the most skillful lawyer instead of whether or not he was guilty, Marie vainly prodded him to proclaim his love for her, to which he replied that the question is nonsense, the priest, assuming that Meursault valued the physical, things of the world, asked him relentlessly why he valued these things and why he doesnt seek God for help in his time of trouble, to which he replied by grabbing him by the cossack (half expecting him to disappear in his hands)and describing the impossibility of being sure of such things, described why he could not believe the same notions, "From the dark horizon of my future a sort of slow, persistent breeze had been blowing toward me, all my life long, from the years that were to come. and on its way that breeze had leveled out all the ideas that people tried to foist on me in the equally unreal years i then was living through."
All is helpless and arbitrary and what can one do but relish that which one is sure of.
"It might look as if my hands were empty. Actually, i was sure of myself, sure about everything, far surer than he; sure of my present life and of the death that was coming. That, no doubt, was all i had; but at least that certainty was something i could get my teeth into - just as it had got its teeth into me. I'd been right, i was still right, i was always right. I'd passed my life in a certain way, and i might have passed it in a different way, if I'd felt like it. I'd acted thus, and i hadn't acted otherwise; I hadn't done x, whereas I had done y or z. And what did that mean? That, all the time, I'd been waiting for this present moment, for that dawn, tomorrow's or another day's, which was to justify me."
"It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, i laid my heart open to the benign indifference of teh universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration."...less
The Stranger 
