Meursault The Stranger Quotes

At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it.

Just read this fabulous screenplay. A remake of Camus's The Stranger with Meursault as a bi break-dancing punk rocker. Randy showed it to me. I loved it. Randy thinks "basically unfilmable" and that filming an orange rolling around a parking lot for three hours would draw a bigger audience.

People always have exaggerated ideas about unfamiliar things'. - Meursault

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.

We [Raymond and Meursault] stared at each other without blinking, and everything came to a stop there between the sea, the sand, and the sun, and the double silence of the flute and the water. It was then that I realized that you could either shoot or not shoot.

So for me Meursault is not a reject, but a poor and naked man, in love with a sun which leaves no shadows. Far from lacking all sensibility, he is driven by a tenacious and therefore profound passion, the passion for an absolute and for truth.

Lots of talk lately about the GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL that seems to be exclusively masculine. And how many of the characters in the GENIUS BOOKS are likable? Is Holden Caulfield likable? Is Meursault in The Stranger? Is Henry Miller? Is any character in any of these system novels particularly likable? Aren’t they usually loathsome but human, etc., loathsome and neurotic and obsessed? In my memory, all the characters in Jonathan Franzen are total douchebags (I know, I know, I’m not supposed to use that, feminine imagery, whatever, but it is SO satisfying to say and think). How about female characters in the genius books? Was Madame Bovary likable? Was Anna Karenina? Is Daisy Buchanan likable? Is Daisy Miller? Is it the specific way in which supposed readers HATE unlikable female characters (who are too depressed, too crazy, too vain, too self-involved, too bored, too boring), that mirrors the specific way in which people HATE unlikable girls and women for the same qualities? We do not allow, really, the notion of the antiheroine, as penned by women, because we confuse the autobiographical, and we pass judgment on the female author for her terrible self-involved and indulgent life. We do not hate Scott Fitzgerald in “The Crack-Up” or Georges Bataille in Guilty for being drunken and totally wading in their own pathos, but Jean Rhys is too much of a victim.

Philosophers like Heidegger have even argued that our scientific understanding of the world, which is essentially aimed at domination and control, has been bought at the price of a damaged relationship between humanity and nature: in Wordsworth’s phrase, “we murder to dissect.” Another ancient argument, and one that remains relevant today, is that the pleasures of appreciating and studying nature are readily available to nearly everyone in almost any circumstances. This consideration also grounds a further subtle argument advanced by Epicurus: studying nature makes us happier because it leads us away from envy, resentment, and dissatisfaction over what we lack compared to others. It does so because it leads us to take pride “in the good things of our own minds rather than in our circumstances.”56 The idea here is that readily available pleasures have a beneficial equalizing function. Ocean-front mansions may be exclusive to the rich, but most facets of nature—trees, wildflowers, birds, insects, beaches, rivers, mountains, stars—are open to all. In an often-cited passage in Albert Camus’s The Stranger, Meursault reflects, while in prison, that he could be content to spend his time simply looking up through a hollow tree trunk at the clouds and birds passing overhead. His thought captures not just the easy and equal accessibility of the pleasures nature offers but also their inexhaustibility.