Meursault Indifference Quotes

While he can interact with others who have no idea that anything is wrong, Ron lives without spontaneity, going through the motions, doing what he thinks people expect him to do, glad that he is able to at least appear normal throughout the day and maintain a job. He studied drama briefly while in college, and remains enamored of Shakespeare and literature, but an emerging self-consciousness eventually robbed him of his ability to act. Now he feels as if all of his life is an act—just an attempt to maintain the status quo. Recalling literature he once loved, he sometimes pictures himself as Camus’s Meursault, in The Stranger: an emotionless character who plods through life in a meaningless universe with apathy and indifference. He’s tired of living this way but terrified of death.

Throughout the whole absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living. What did other people's deaths or a mother's love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we're all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? Couldn't he see, couldn't he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. And he would be condemned, too. What would it matter if he were accused of murder and then executed because he didn't cry at his mother's funeral? Salamano's dog was worth just as much as his wife. The little robot woman was just as guilty as the Parisian woman Masson married, or as Marie, who had wanted me to marry her. What did it matter that Raymond was as much my friend as Celeste, who was worth a lot more than him? What did it matter that Marie now offered her lips to a new Meursault? Couldn't he, couldn't this condemned man see ... And that from somewhere deep in my future ... All the shouting had me gasping for air. But they were already tearing the chaplain from my grip and the guards were threatening me. He calmed them, though, and looked at me for a moment without saying anything. His eyes were full of tears. Then he turned and disappeared. With him gone, I was able to calm down again. I was exhausted and threw myself on my bunk. I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up with the stars in my face. Sounds of the countryside were drifting in. Smells of night, earth, and salt air were cooling my temples. The wondrous peace of that sleeping summer Rowed through me like a tide. Then, in the dark hour before dawn, sirens blasted. They were announcing departures for a world that now and forever meant nothing to me. For the first time in a long time I thought about Maman. I felt as if I understood why at the end of her life she had taken a "fiance," why she had played at beginning again. Even there, in that home where lives were fading out, evening was a kind of wistful respite. So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again. Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her. And I felt ready to live it all again too. As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself-so like a brother, really-! felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.

Now we have complicated the question a little more by our analysis of freedom. The Outsider wants to be free; he doesn’t want to become a healthy-minded, once-born person because he declares such a person is not free. He is an Outsider because he wants to be free. And what characterizes the ‘bondage5 of the once-born? Unreality, the Outsider replies. So we can at least say that, whatever the Outsider wants to become, that new condition of being will be characterized by a perception of reality. And reality ?—what can the Outsider tell us about that? That is more difficult. We have got two distinct sets of answers. Let us try posing the question to various Outsiders, and compare their answers: So, our question: What is Reality? Barbusse: Knowledge of the depths of human nature. Wells: The Cinema sheet; man’s utter nothingness. Roquentin: Naked existence that paralyses and negates the human mind. Meursault: Glory. The Universe’s magnificent indifference. No matter what these stupid and half-real human beings do, the reality is serene and unchanging. This is a fuller answer than the other three; we can follow it up by asking Meursault: And what of the human soul? Meursault: Its ground is the same as that of the universe. Man escapes his triviality by approaching his own fundamental indifference to everyday life. Hemingway too would give us some such answer. Ask him what he means by ‘reality’: Krebs: The moment when you do ‘the one thing, the only thing’, when you know you’re not merely a trivial, superficial counter on the social chessboard. Strowde: Ineffable. Unlivable. The man who has seen it is spoilt for everyday life.