In The Stranger, on page 43, Mersault encounters a "strange little woman" at Celeste's. This woman is everything that Mersault is not, she acts as a foil to Mersault's character.
From the moment Camus introduces her to the moment she leaves, she is acts with purpose and precision. The way Mersault describes her makes her seem absurd and one dimensional. In the rest of his encounters with people he spends considerable time describing their looks and their emotions. Apart from his description of her "face like an apple", he makes no mention of her looks or expressions, she does not seem fully human to him. Mersault's descriptive observations of her calculated actions reveal his fascination with her particularities and more importantly how they contrast to his passive nature. Towards the end of the scene, Mersault describes that she "stood up...with the same robotlike movements, and left...with incredible speed and assurance." As always, Mersault "didn't have anything to do" and followed her. This reveals that Mersault feels so purposeless that his encounter with an extremely intentional person seems absurd to him. It is funny how the passage ends by Camus saying that Mersault "forgot about her a few minutes later", further characterizing Mersault as a person who does not find meaning in life.
I think by making her a "Little Apple Robot Woman", Camus is showing how people fill up their time with meaninglessness mundane actions to try to create purpose in their life. He is making a statement about existentialism, a main theme in The Stranger and almost justifying Mersault's way of being. Because why should people care about anything or feel anything or act with purpose if it means nothing in the end?
No comments:
Post a Comment