Human Relations in Camus' Novel, The Outsider, from an Existentialist View

Human relations are very important for any human, and differ from one age to another because of the emerging of different movements across time. The human relations with God, love, society, death etc… are relations that human make to live his life. I study in this paper the human relations in The Outsider novel by Albert Camus from an existentialist view. I want to study Meursault relations who is the main character in Albert Camus’s novel The Outsider , Meursault is being executed because he kills an arab person, but the main reason is that he does not cry at his mother’ funeral and lives his life as there is nothing happened, he goes in the next day to swim and he makes love with his friend Marie and also watch a film. The philosophers and critics considers Meursault as he is authentic to himself , and Buber argued that authentic existence was impossible without a serious relationship with other persons.

Existentialism according to Ian Craib “is notoriously difficult to define and even those writers covered by the term do not always acknowledge it. According to Simone de Beauvoir ( 1968: 45 – 6 ) “ … we took the epithet that everyone used for us and used it to our own purposes.’ “ ( Craib 1 )

Although, there was a problem in defining the existentialism because of different ideas and different use by the writers we can define it as a philosophical and literary tendency that typically displays a dismissal of abstract theories that seek to disguise the untidiness of actual human lives and emphasizes the subjective realities of individual existence, individual freedom, and individual choice. It is virtually impossible to define absolutely as it is now so broad in its approaches but some of its major strands can b...

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...or the existentialists is get to used for every thing in his life.

Works cited

Bree, Germaine, ed. Camus A collection of Critical Essays. Prentice- Hall,INC. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1962.

Craib, Ian. Existentialism and Sociology, A Study of Jean-Paul Sartre , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Human Emotions. New York, the Philosophical Library, 1957.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Humanism, London, Methuen. 1995.

Thody, Philip.Macmillan Modern Novelists, Albert Camus. Hong Kong. Macmillan. 1989.

Warnock, Mary. Existentialism. Oxford New York. Oxford University Press, 1992.

http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/philosophy/existentialism.html

http://www.greatcom.org/resources/handbook_of_todays_religions/04chap04/default.htm. http://radicalacademy.com/adiphiexistentialism.htm