The Stranger Essay Outline

Thesis: Camus creates situations where an average person assumes certain responses. By ignoring the expected behavior for an individual Camus entices the reader to construct meaning out of the meaningless.

  

Example 1: “Then I dozed off again. I woke up because my back was hurting more and more” (Camus 11).

Mersault fell asleep at his mother’s funeral and this is the exact opposite of the behavior that one would expect. Mersault mother has died and typically a person would be crying or show some sense of loss. Instead, it seems that Mersault is reacting in an opposite, because he is completely comfortable with the situation. The scenes makes a person wonder what Mersault’s relationship was with his mom, or was his mom mean to him, and many other questions to make sense of why Mersault deemed falling asleep at a funeral acceptable behavior. Camus puts the scene in because he wants us to make sense of meaningless because an absurdist would never do that.

Example 2: “Then she wanted to know if I loved her. I answered the same way I had the last time, that it didn’t mean anything but that I probably didn’t love her” (Camus 41).

Marie and Mersault are talking and Marie continued to question Mersault about his love for her. Mersault does not love her, and he vocally expresses that fact. Marie still believes that he loves, because she over analyzes everything. A simple smile in her eyes appears as a declaration of love. Camus creates Marie, because she is an example of our responses to Mersault; we want to find meaning.

Example 3: “He looked upset and told me that I never gave him a straight answer, that I had no ambition, and that that was disastrous in business” (Camus 41).

Mersault has just shown no interest in a job offer in Paris that his boss wanted Mersault to take. His reaction is different from a typical person, because most people leap at any suggestion of moving forward in their career. Camus illustrates that an absurdist sees a typical response as ridiculous because in the end, we all end up in the same place.

Example 4:  “They always came at dawn, I knew that. And so I spent my nights waiting for that dawn” (Camus 113).

Mersault focuses on the time that his beheading will occur. The expected behavior is that a person will cling to the hope of an appeal. Mersault instead focuses on the time, because the end result does not matter. He is following the absurdist view, because he must face the consequences of his actions.