The Stranger is my absolute favorite novel we've read. Not because of the character, but because of the way it makes you question everything you know. Mersault isn't normal. He doesn't seem to feel any emotions at all, and it disturbs me as I read about things from his perspective. But in class, the question that came up was whether his neutrality on certain things along with his lack of interest in social norms made him a bad person. It caused me to think, why is it that humans are expected to react in a certain way? Is it because we're raised with these expectations on how to react to certain situations publicly, or is it because we genuinely feel these emotions and our reactions are organic products? Mersault doesn't defend the bad, nor does he defend the good. He is simply detached from the situation, and chooses to be neutral as possible. It's really fascinating reading things from his perspective, because you genuinely can't tell whether he has emotions that are just severely repressed/muted, or whether he truly can't feel anything.
In the initial stages of the story, I wasn't quite sure as to how I would get a good grasp of Clarissa Dalloway, since this narrator is so unique. The narrator doesn't remain with Clarissa, and has already established its ability to travel within the deep minds of multiple characters. From what we saw of Clarissa in the beginning, all I could really grasp was her bird-like qualities, and the fact that she had been sick for a while. Yet while reading last night's chapter on her encounter with Peter, it really pulled together a stronger image of her, and I could finally see at how Woolf focuses on her as a person. On page 40, Peter says, "Here she is mending her dress; mending her dress as usual, he thought; here she's been sitting all the time I've been in India; mending her dress; playing about; going to parties..." The narrator is clearly revealing Peter's true thoughts on Clarissa in that moment. Yet I can't help but disagree with Peter. Clar...
I agree. His perspective is fascinating, and often it is difficult to interpret what is happening because we see it from his eyes alone. Is what he is telling us what he is really feeling, or is he blocking the reader from seeing all of him?
ReplyDeleteI really like how you bring up the questioning of WHY we feel like he is bad or wrong in some cases (excluding the murder). Just because he doesn't function as we do? Who is to say that makes him a bad person? I think this really brings up the point that Camus is trying to get readers to think about, which is that no one can really judge another for their actions "fairly", that it's all subjective. "Good" and "bad" are different for everyone, and therefore arbitrary and insufficient qualifiers for people.
ReplyDeleteI think that we expect Mersault to act a certain way in certain situations because we would act that way in that situation, and of course we think that the way that we act is right.
ReplyDeleteYeah, the thought that we judge things that are different like his actions as bad is really scary to me. Who are we to say! Meusault might question pure the existence of good and bad, but even from a more "typical" standpoint of morals, judging his actions(before he wrote the letter, and murder) seems like a dangerous precedent. Kinda ironic cause the court said that he was the dangerous precedent for society but maybe judging him is the real danger.
ReplyDeleteI also found his take on things very out of the norm and not what you'd normally expect. Meursault tells things as is; he is not like any other narrator you'd find in a book because he never includes his feelings or opinions on things, he just tells the story exactly as it happened.
ReplyDeleteI like that you questioned why we feel that Meursault's neutrality makes him a bad person. I definitely thought that he was during our class discussions. However, you have me wondering why I ever felt that way. I do think there are multiple sides to every story, and Meursault's is only one. Not only that, but we only get to see him after his mother's death - we do not know much about his childhood, or the kind of person he was before he received the news of her death. Do we really have a right to judge him without the full picture?
ReplyDeleteI agree, Meursault has a very unusual perspective on life. It makes us question if our emotions are genuine, or if they are merely products of our society and our social situation. And if they are products of these events, are they any less valid? Is Meursault's lack of emotion socially acceptable and valid? I would think so. Meursault is also explicitly judged for not having emotions in the novel, which is interesting to read as we judge him ourselves.
ReplyDeleteI feel like Meursault's take on life doesn't really make him a good person or a bad one. He's really easily to convince to do whatever the person he's with does. There isn't anything inherently wrong with not caring about anything but when he starts doing stuff that hurts other people's that's when most of us reading draw the line. If Meursault never got involved with Raymond and didn't end up helping him do all that stuff then I feel like most people would think Meursault is strange but no t awful.
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