Meursault - The Anti-Hero Protagonist

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Life is often interpreted as having meaning or purpose. For people like Meursault, the anti-hero protagonist of Albert Camus' The Stranger, the world is completely without either. Camus' story explores the world through the eyes of Meursault, who is quite literally a stranger to society in his indifference to meaning, values, and morals. In this novel, the protagonist lives on with this indifference and is prosecuted and sentenced to die for it. Through Meursault and his ventures in The Stranger, Camus expresses to the reader the idea that the world is fundamentally absurd, but people will react to absurdity by attaching meaning to it in vain, despite the fact that the world, like Meursault, is indifferent to everything. Meursault appears not to care for anything, regardless of what it may be. The novel starts off with a very heavy hand of indifference when Meursault states that his mom “died today. Or yesterday maybe, [he doesn't] know . . . that doesn't mean anything” (Camus 3). To most people in society, he would be a monster for not knowing the date his mom died or for not showing any grief or anguish at his mom’s death. It's not that he had a positive or negative emotional disposition towards the death or the funeral, but the fact was simply that his mom died. In fact, he states later that he “probably did love Maman, but that didn't mean anything” (65). While he stated that he probably did love her, he attaches no meaning to the love or the death, merely stating them as occurrences. Camus was an absurdist, and as we later learn through Meursault, Camus perhaps wished to demonstrate that life has no meaning.

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