Albert Camus
Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in the French colonial Algeria. His father was killed in 1914 at the battle of the Marne in World War I. Although his family was impoverished, Camus attended the university in Algiers. He paid for his education with odd jobs until a severe attack of tuberculosis forced him to drop out. His writing is greatly influenced by the poverty and illness of his youth. After dropping out, he eventually entered the world of political journalism. He wrote extensively about poverty in Algeria while working as a journalist for an anti-colonialist newspaper. During World War II, he went to Paris and joined the anti-German resistance movement. It was in wartime Paris that Camus developed his philosophy of the absurd--the assertion that life ultimately has no rational meaning. The Stranger, his first novel, deals with the hysteria provoked by Meursault's challenge to the accepted moral order. He does not cry at his mother's funeral, and he does not believe in God. He also kills a man he barely knows, "the Arab," without any real motive. He is tried and sentenced to death. "While the philosophy of Camus's fiction often tends to imply that no moral order actually has a rational basis, Camus himself did
However, Camus may wish to paint a character who displays this weakness. To him it is not enough to make Meursault admirable, and, in fact, it encourages the readers' sympathies veering toward the other characters who are frightened by his moral emptiness (Bree 93). The Public Prosecutor's convoluted logic equates Meursault's lack of emotion of his mother's death to symbolic matricide and even to actual parricide. For the first time in his life he becomes introspective. He even is willing to lie under certain circumstances. None of the Arabs have individual names or unique personalities. Introspection has not been his metier. The racism in Algeria goes centuries back. More positively, one seeks pleasure in an harmonious relationship with the external world. The Stranger by Albert Camus uses many of these references to racism throughout his novel. "However, he suffers a great deal contemplating the executioner's blade. He is indifferent to Raymond beating his girlfriend, or Salamano beating his dog. The only thing that could make his death happy is to maintain his stance as a rebel, a social outcast subject to the "howls of execration" by a mob of spectators (Champigny 52).
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Acceptance Essays
