The Absurd Morality of Death in The Outsider
In The Outsider by Albert Camus, death can clearly be seen as a
significant image - there being six deaths mentioned in total. In Part
One we are shown the natural death of Meursault's mother and
Meursault's murder of the Arab, and in Part Two we are presented with
the parricide of a brother/son and the subsequent suicide of the
perpetrators, another parricide that is to be tried after Meursault's
case and the death penalty pronounced on Meursault. Through these
depictions of various deaths, Camus shows clearly the conflicting and
often arbitrary treatment of death within society, a treatment that
reveals a confusion between the motives behind acts and the subsequent
response to the completed acts, which ultimately reflects the nature
of the absurd prevalent in the novel.
Section One: deaths directly linked to Meursault
Mrs Meursault's Funeral
Death, as an important image, is established in the very first
sentence of the book, "Mother died today."[1] The simplicity and
directness of this statement is shocking for the reader, and leads us
to try to understand what sort of man Meursault is - a task that we
discover later has been laid as a trap for us. However, even though
this first sentence is simple and direct, it is confused in the very
next sentence, "Or maybe yesterday, I don't know."[2] This confusion
over the time of the death can be generalised to the circumstances of
the death, which are in this case unclear, and indeed we are never
told what the cause of Mrs Meursault's death was. All we have are the
allusions to her age, "About sixty,"[3] and her 'friend', who was "an
old man"[4] that could not prevent himself from "fainting (like a
disloca...
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...t, The Outsider (Penguin Classics), p60.
[13] Ibid. P69.
[14] Ibid. P63.
[15] Ibid. P64.
[16] Ibid. P85.
[17] Ibid. P85.
[18] Ibid. P57.
[19] Ibid. P58.
[20] Ibid. P58.
[21] Ibid. P60
[22] Camus, Albert, The Outsider (Penguin Classics, 2000), p64
[23] Ibid. P68.
[24] Ibid. P98.
[25] Ibid. P99.
[26] Ibid. P116
[27] Ibid. P103.
[28] Camus, Albert, The Outsider (Penguin Classics, 2000), p104.
[29] Ibid. P109.
[30] Ibid. P109.
[31] Ibid. P114.
[32] Ibid. P112.
[33] Ibid. P115.
[34] Ibid. P117.
[35] Ibid. P117.
[36] Camus, Albert, The Outsider (Penguin Classics, 2000), p77.
[37] Ibid. P78.
[38] Camus, Albert, The Outsider (Penguin Classics, 2000), p 78.
[39] Ibid. P78
[40] Ibid. P82.
[41] Ibid. P82.
[42] Ibid. P102.
[43] Camus, Albert, The Outsider (Penguin Classics, 2000), p116.
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