"The Stranger" Your Local Psychopath

The title of this post may seem like a hyperbole but by the end of this post I hope to show that there is a solid foundation for such a bold claim.

Before I tell you how the main character in the stranger, Meursault, is a psychopath first you must understand the traits a psychopath posses. The main traits of a psychopath are summarized as follows:  cunning and manipulative, lack of remorse, shallow emotional responses, callous and lack of empathy.

After reading those traits you might already being thinking, "wow he really is a psychopath, how didn't I see that", or you aren't. Either way it is hard deny that Meursault exemplifies some, although I would argue most, of these psychopathic traits thus far.

The one aspect Meursault has yet to show is manipulation, he has yet to care about something enough to manipulate it. However, the lack of emotion he shows towards anyone or anything plays into all the other aspects of a psychopath.

When Meursault shoots the Arab man at the end of part one his only sentiment was that shooting his lifeless body was like "knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness". If shooting an already dead man four times doesn't scream that something is wrong with the individual, not feeling more than four hints of unhappiness should. If a person in a normal mental state was put in this position not only would they be unlikely to, as one might say, beat the dead horse but beating the dead horse would  feel like a battering ram destroying the gates of clinical depression. Another less obvious example of lack of Meursaults remorse is when he is perfectly content with him helping Raymond get away with beating a woman. It also shows how Meursault is callous and lacks empathy for the victim and is even unwilling to get help for the victim due to personal begrudging.

Unlike a lack of remorse and empathy, Meursault's shallow emotional responses litter part one of the novel. It begins with him being indifferent towards the death of his mother and continues throughout the novel with him showing indifference towards everything and anything such as the aforementioned death and even marriage.

While some readers might point out how he shows some emotion with Marie it is minimal and what is there he separates from himself and looks at the emotion objectively. As the definitions states there can be emotion as long as it is shallow which I think can be universally agreed upon thus far.

I do acknowledge that he might develop and break away from these psychopathic traits but as of now, in part one, it is my very professional opinion that Meursault is a psychopath.