The moment that I found strangest in the first few chapters of The Stranger was when Thomas Perez, Meursault's mother's friend, struggled to keep up with the procession so he kept on taking shortcuts through the countryside but when he finally caught up he had "big tears of frustration and exhaustion... streaming down his face" and when the procession got to the church Perez "crumpled like a rag doll" (18).
I was taken aback by the amount of effort Perez put into keeping up with the others and by Meursault's lack of reaction. Meursault seems indifferent to Perez's struggles which makes the situation feel normal and commonplace in the context of the book yet strange in the context of the real world. At this point in the book, Meursault's apathy towards others already seems to be a reoccurring theme and his behavior towards Perez in his time of grieving exemplifies this. He doesn't think about how Perez is feeling after losing his one friend or worry about why he would put so much effort into keeping up to the point of fainting.
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