Meursault's Guilt Research Paper

Superior Essays
Guilt and Innocence in The Stranger
“Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: ‘Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.’ That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.” (Camus 3) The perplexing tale of Meursault, an emotionally detached and seemingly amoral young man living in Algiers, stands notoriously as the introduction to “the absurd.” Albert Camus coined this school of thought, using The Stranger as a mechanism for expressing his ideas in the novel that has confused, overwhelmed, and disoriented readers for decades since its publication. In Camus’ popular, yet controversial novel, he tells the story of Meursault’s unfortunate lifestyle of apathy. Unaffected by the death of his own mother, Meursault lives on indifferently - until midway through the book, he finds himself shooting and killing a man he hardly knows for no discernible reason. For the final stages of the absurdist narrative, Camus writes of the direct confrontation between guilt and innocence in two different layers: first legal, then existential. Hence, Camus creates a dichotomy between the complex ideas of responsibility and determinism: if our lives are predetermined, do we truly possess free will? If we do not possess free will, how can we be held responsible for our actions? Conflicting normative theories of ethics have plagued the existence of human beings for centuries as the epistemological debate has attempted to distinguish an objective answer; in fact, literary theorist Louis Rossi writes that “the confession or denial of man’s fault is certainly older than Genesis” (Rossi 400). Understanding Camus’ stance in the ancient debate requires deciphering how Meursault’s circumstances reflect the absurd in an affectionately regarded “process of continual interrogation” (Greetham 4). Deconstruction theories are often considered to be a literary process, or rather, “an attitude towards the apparent structures embedded in works (and texts), and an attempt to interrogate those structures” (Greetham 2). Consequently, by observing the language of The Stranger, the ambiguous plot can be contextualized through Camus’ absurdist ideologies. Death serves as the great equalizer for those guilty and innocent, both within the novella as well as within absurdist theories, because “death makes all human experience equally unimportant and yet equally precious” (Bersani 216). Camus reflects that all life, including the life of fictitious Meursault, is predetermined to end in death. For this reason, what happens between birth and death is absurd; paradoxically hopeless and incredibly important. The details of one’s life, therefore, are uniformly meaningless - however, the beauty in this ideology is its destruction of conventional social hierarchies due to each race, class, or other group being equally as insignificant as the next. Above all, the determinist ideas outlined in The Stranger demonstrate why Meursault does not feel guilty about the murder he commits: he feels as if the events of the world are outside of his control; thus, he believes he should not be held accountable for an action that he sees as involuntary. Notably, Meursault’s battle against culpability begins from the beginning of the novella when he must request days off work in order to attend his mother’s funeral. His boss responds unfavorably, thus pushing Meursault to defensively claim: “‘It’s not my fault’” (Camus 3). While it may be true that the young Frenchman could not have possibly prevented his mother’s death, his boss blames Meursault for missing work to attend the
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The man is, indeed, a derelict; he has no intellectual life, no love, no friendship, no interest in anyone or faith in anything. His life is limited to physical sensations and to cheap pleasures of modern mass culture” (Girard 528). Meursault serves as a reminder to deeply existentialist, nihilist, or even absurdist philosophers that the consequences of diminishing life ultimately lead to misery: “Indeed, death makes hope absurd” (Bersani 217). A life lived entirely in fear of death is a life wasted. Similarly, absolving all individuals of responsibility for conscious decisions - whether or not these conscious decisions were predetermined - is fallacious, because the average human mind is capable of discerning right and wrong. If the brain consciously deviates from acting in the morally right or socially accepted manner, then the individual freely made this decision. Even the paramount absurdist himself admits: “At any rate, one is always a bit guilty” (Camus

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