The Stranger
...ault didn’t know how to react during the funeral. He just stared blankly and saw how Mr. Thomas Pérez cried at the funeral and fainted when the sand was being thrown at the casket. He remained frozen, “ . . . more people, voices, the village, waiting in front of a café, the incessant drone of the motor, and my joy when the bus entered the nest of lights that was Algiers and I knew I was going to go to bed and sleep for twelve hours,” (pg.18). It shows how closed up and unsentimental he is about his mother’s death. In a way Meursault has the right to be this way, especially toward his mum. They weren’t close and they despised each other. Maman always complained to the people at the home about how Meursault was with her, how he never visited her and put her here in this home. He didn’t care about her and didn’t bother to visit her so, why should he have any feelings toward her? Marie, a coworker of Monsieur Meursault, enters his life and loves him. Meursault and Marie become what you can say, physically attracted to each other. The day of Maman’s death, according to the prosecutor, “this man was out swimming, starting up a dubious liaison, and going to the movies, a comedy, for laughs,” (pg.94). The day Marie spent with Meursault she tells him she loves him but Meursault doesn’t say anything about it. It seems as though she is just playing a childish game of “he loves me, he loves me not.” At one point Meursault says, “A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn’t mean anything but that I didn’t think so,” (pg.35). This man has no feelings whatsoever because he made Marie really sad. Even though they had one encounter, it didn’t mean he loved her but he could’ve said it in a nicer way. He didn’t think about his words and made this “beautiful” girl sad. One evening as Marie visits Meursault he encounters another run in with one of her questions. “That evening Marie came by and asked me if I wanted to marry her. I said it didn’t make any difference to me and that we could if she wanted to. Then she wanted to know if I loved her. I answered the same way I had last time that it didn’t mean anything but that I probably didn’t love her,” (pg.41). Meursault shows in what he says that he has no feelings toward anyone of anything. Marie makes a fool of herself by asking him these things especially since he’s a guy and guys are known to be afraid of commitment or anything close to it. Maybe Meursault had a bad time with love or with having any type of close relation with someone but he’s human, he must have at least one tiny portion of humanity in him. His actions and words hurt those around him and he doesn’t bother fixing them because he doesn’t know what these “feelings” are. In the long run, maybe Meursault deserved to be alone the rest of his life because why should he be around other people. He doesn’t know what it’s like to be happy yet he says he knows what it’s like, “ . . . I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself–so like a brother, really–I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again,” (pg.123), “...I could make out one by one, as if from the depths of my exhaustion, all the familiar sounds of a town I loved and of a certain time of day when I used to feel happy,” (pg.97). Maybe at one point in his life he felt this but there is no recollection of his that states when or why he stopped. Monsieur Meursault “gets drawn into a senseless murder” because of his friend Raymond. Raymond lived in the same building as Meursault. He had a run-in with a woman and he beat her. She must’ve had been Arabic because Raymond mentions that t...