As a human being you would normally feel sadness when your mum dies.
As a human being you would normally feel happiness and loved when someone is in love with you.
As a human being you would normally feel guilt when killing someone.
As a human being you would normally feel scared and depressed when in front of a court for a murder.
As a human being you would normally feel anger and unfairness when sentenced to death by decapitating in public.
Emotionally detached.
But Mersault does not feel these things. Mersault does not express any emotions. Mersault seems to have this protective layer surrounding him which keeps anything from harming him, or from pleasing him.
Even though the story, The Outsider; Albert Camus, is quite short, it took me quite some time to get through – mostly due to the depressive atmosphere that follows you page in and page out. Somehow I felt all these feelings that Mersault didn’t feel, and on and off I was filled with anger. I got so engrossed in the story that I even became angry with him for not feeling, for not expressing and for not being human.
Instead of describing his own feelings, Mersault tells us all about surroundings, details, people, basically everything that exists and happens around himself, but he never touches the subject himself. When he commits the murder – which is a revenge act – he does not regret it, because; “As an existentialist, he has no reason to regret what he does because it is done; regret is redundant.”
Existentialist’s, and Søren Kierkegaard (who is regarded the father of Existentialism), say that it’s up to each and everyone themselves to give a meaning to their own lives, and to live “that life passionately and sincerely” not being interrupted and wander astray even though many obstacles such as despair, alienation and boredom stands in its way. Mainly this way of thinking became in fashion after the Second World War when people wanted to stand for their own rights, claim that their opinions were the right ones and make sure that the human freedom and individuality would not get in the hands of a tyrant or similar kind of leader, as it did during this war when Hitler had the power. Nietzsche had similar thoughts and ideas before Kierkegaard but his concepts and theories were not really talked about until this period of time (after the wars), when he was already dead.
Existentialism is a very wide subject, lots of different theories within the concept as such. But this is all I'm gonna offer you today. Next - fascism.
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2 comments:
As we talked about it, it is non human to behave like the main character of this book did. I think we both agreed that he cannot be fully happy being so emotionless, even though he says that here are moments that he is not "unhappy" in the book. It is crazy that he feels nothing than a shame that he will miss few days at work when his mum dies and when his girlfriend asks him to marry him, he simply "doesn't mind"! Wow, this book is just shocking, it amazed me in every moment that I was emotionally moved and he just said- it doesn't matter or he didn't care??? It even made me angry reading his reactions to certain events in his life. It was bizarre experience reading this book because the same moments that put me off reading it kept me reading it because I was curious his odd reactions and I wanted to find out how much more differently he will react to other stuff happening to him... I enjoyed it and I hated it at the same time.
YES! Agree, agree, agree. Further on, the author must have had a few problems himself with feelings and emotions - how could you write so coldhearted about these events otherwise? I'm not sure I could strip myself from all the emotions and apply this to another character (even fictious).. But like you said, one of the books you really just want to put down and not finish off, at the same time as you're too eager to find out what will happen on the next page.. Weird and shocking. Bizarre!
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