Surprise, surprise, the Stranger is an existentialist book! w0w!
Anyway.
It's interesting to see someone depict existentialism this way and to think about how far some of these things go. I have plenty of friends who live their life like the narrator does-- day in, day out, nothing really matters. Just with the flow. However, can I imagine my friends killing someone just because a knife was flashed at them in a conflict that really doesn't concern them? Of course not! But it's interesting how when you look at it in that full perspective, it makes perfect sense when he does it. And only then, it seems, at least from him calling the next four shots 'knocking on the door of despair,' he snap out of it. At least I predict. Part 1 of the story is simply showing how one can get in a funk-- and then you don't realize what you have until it's all gone. At least until he fires the shots, I would almost argue that the narrator is more of a nihlist than an existentialist-- he finds no meaning or importance in anything that he does.
Interesting.
You bring up a cool point that at end of part one, Meursault is arguably more a nihilist than an existentialist. And how you say that when we look at what he did, in killing the man, as making perfect sense, I'm thinking that it also means that the readers were so absorbed in Meursault's way of thinking and only realized along with him the full extent of what he did.
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ReplyDeleteI think this is a really interesting point. All of the talk of existentialism is making my brain hurt, but your ideas make it a little bit easier to understand. Since Meusault was in such a funk from having such a routine, him killing the man almost makes sense (in one of the weirdest ways possible). It's like him shooting the man was really just an action to give meaning to his life.
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