The Stranger Camus as a philosophical novel and parable. Analysis of works A

The work belongs to the genre philosophical reflection in the spirit of the existentialist movement, which considers human existence in the form of absolute uniqueness.

The key character of the story is a young man named Meursault, presented by the writer as an office worker, characterized by a romantic union with surrounding nature, while feeling loneliness and indifference to the people around him, not understanding their true meaning in life. The only moments that do not leave the hero indifferent are described in the form of carnal joys (food, sleep, relationships with the female sex). Meursault is described in the story as a person removed from life's existence, located in his own atmosphere, isolated from the outside world, living by sensation, mood, feelings, not recognizing socially significant values.

The compositional structure of the story is presented in three parts, the first of which tells the story of the main character, the second part tells about the hero’s commission of a crime, and the final part reveals the protest of Meursault, who is in captivity, against the prevailing public morality, without making attempts to save own life.

The problematics of the work are represented by several themes in the form life meaning, crisis of faith, the concept of permissiveness and correctness of human choice, as well as the absurdity of reality.

The storyline of the work tells about the fateful act of the main character, expressed in the accidental murder of an Arab who was pursuing him, which results in the execution of Meursault.

The author's plan builds the content of the story in the form of a confession of the main character, who is awaiting his own execution, while Meursault's repentance is absent in the narrative, and there is only a desire to explain his actions, and first of all to himself.

The stylistic characteristics of the story are represented by numerous simple sentences, devoid of complex subordination, creating the impression of dry syllables and allowing the readership to replenish the sensations through their own emotions and experiences.

The climax of the plot takes place in the final part of the story in the form of a conversation between the prisoner Meursault, awaiting execution of his death sentence, and the priest who visited him for repentance. In the scene of the conversation with the spiritual father, the true meaning of the image of the main character is revealed, categorically denying religious dogmas, feeling the irreversibility of the destruction of his world, but feeling only annoyance and slight regret.

The literary significance of the work lies in the depiction of an indifferent person, an existing world of indifference, the symbol of which is a random passer-by, who is in reality temporarily and idlely, presented by the writer as an absurd person speaking out against insincere, false public opinion.

Option 2

Albert Camus's story is an artistic presentation of the author's philosophical postulates. Camus himself was a notable thinker of the early twentieth century. He adhered to the ideas of existentialism, which assumed the simple existence of people in the world, denying the principle of divine direction of life.

The story “The Outsider” is a vivid example of the author’s ideas, conveyed to the reader in simple and understandable language. The main character Meursault is an adherent of existentialism and perceives life differently than those around him. He doesn’t cry and get upset at his mother’s funeral, he doesn’t strive to marry his girlfriend and start a full-fledged family. By demonstrating such behavior, Meursault seems to be rebelling against generally accepted norms. But this is not a provocative protest, its purpose is to draw attention to himself. Rather, the hero does not understand those around him to the same extent that he himself is incomprehensible to them.

The key event of the work is the murder committed by Meursault without any apparent motive. The only thing that prompted the hero to commit a crime was the scorching sun, which temporarily clouded his mind. However, neither the investigation nor the jury can accept such a reason. In the second half of the story, they desperately try to explain the hero’s behavior at the level of the usual foundations of society.

Meursault is not so simple. He feels like an outcast among people. He is well aware that he will never be able to understand the “normal” way of life. Likewise simple people will never be able to accept him, so the hero decides not to justify his behavior. In contrast, he feels very strongly about his connection with nature. He doesn’t want to get promoted so as not to leave the sea for a stuffy city.

In all the events described by the hero, a key place is given to the weather. The unbearable heat, the scorching sun, the gentle sea occupy the character much more than what is happening around him. The narrative style is laconic and dry. The hero does not consider it necessary to express strong emotions, because in this world he is just an observer.

For this reason, Meursault gets used to being in prison. After all, this is just another part of his life. The only thing that makes him angry is an attempt to impose alien ideals on him. He enters into a heated argument with the priest, who convinces him to repent and accept God's will. Meursault angrily defends his beliefs, because a person does not carry out anyone’s will, he simply lives alone in the world, among the same lonely people. True to his ideas to the last, the hero decides to simply accept death rather than agree with the generally accepted point of view.

The story “The Outsider” is an artistic manifesto of existential philosophy, which expresses a complex system of worldviews in the language of fiction and thereby adapts it for a wide range of readers. Albert Camus wrote many scientific works, where he outlined all the principles and dogmas of existentialism, but many people could not master these treatises and would never know about their content. Then the philosopher turned into a writer and in his work reflected the reflection of the post-war generation, which perceived the world around so painfully.

The idea for the work was formed in 1937, that is, it took about three years to write it. In his notebook, Albert Camus sketched out a schematic description of his future work:

Story: a man who doesn't want to make excuses. He prefers the idea that others have about him. He dies, content with the knowledge that he was right. The futility of this consolation

The composition of the novel (or story, there is no consensus on this matter) consists of three parts, the author mentioned this in his notes in August 1937. The first tells about the background of the hero: who he is, how he lives, what he does with his time. In the second, a crime occurs. But the most important part is the final one, where Meursault rebels against any compromise with the prevailing morality and prefers to leave everything as it is - not to try to save himself.

Many researchers find similarities between “The Stranger” and Camus’s first major work of art, “The Happy Death”: plot twists, names of characters, and some subtle details are repeated. Moreover, the writer transferred some fragments without changing either the content or the form. It should be noted that among the possible titles of the book there were such options as: “ Happy man", "Ordinary Man", "Indifferent".

Camus used the composition of the novel “The Red and the Black” by Stendhal. The works are divided into two parts, climaxes and philosophical intensity - scenes in the cells. Meursault is the antipode of Sorel: he neglects his career and women, he kills, and does not attempt to kill, by accident, and not on purpose, he does not justify himself. But both of them are romantics, closely connected with nature and sensitive to it.

Meaning of the name

The title of the story is intriguing; it was not often that works, especially those of those years, were called only one adjective. The title of the work “The Outsider” is an indication of the peculiarity of the main character: he treats the world around him detachedly, separately, as if what is happening anywhere and by anyone does not bother him, as an outsider. He has somewhere to go, here he temporarily, idly and indifferently contemplates what is, and does not feel any emotions other than the consequences of physical sensations. He is a random passer-by who is not affected by anything.

His detachment is most clearly expressed in his attitude towards his mother. He describes in detail how hot it was on the day of her funeral, but does not reveal his sadness in a word. Meursault is not indifferent to her, he simply lives not by socially significant values, but by sensations, moods and feelings, like primitive. The logic of his behavior is revealed in his refusal of the promotion offer. It is more important for him to see the sea than to earn more. In this action he Once again demonstrates how alien to him is the consumerist and sometimes sentimental philosophy of modern society.

What is this book about?

The scene is Algeria, at that time a colony of France. Office worker Meursault receives notice of his mother's death. She lived out her life in an almshouse, and he goes there to say goodbye to her. However, the hero does not experience any special feelings, as his indifferent tone eloquently communicates. He mechanically performs the necessary rituals, but cannot even squeeze out tears. Afterwards, the man returns home, and from the description of his life we learn that he is absolutely indifferent to everything that is dear to the average person: his career (he refuses a promotion in order not to leave the sea), family values(he doesn’t care whether he has a marriage with Marie or not), friendship (when his neighbor tells him about her, he doesn’t understand what they’re talking about), etc.

The lack of emotion is expressed not by the narrator himself, but by the style of his presentation, because the story in “The Outsider” is told from his point of view. Immediately after his mother's funeral, he gets a girlfriend and takes her to the cinema. At the same time, he builds relationships with his neighbor, who shares with him the most frank details of his personal life. Raymond supported a local woman, but they had a disagreement about money, and her lover beat her. The victim's brother, according to the customs of his ancestors, vowed to take revenge on the offender, and since then the impulsive man has been under surveillance. He enlists the support of Meursault, and together with the ladies they go to the dacha of a mutual friend. But even there the pursuers did not retreat, and the main character just met one of them under the scorching rays of the sun. Just the day before, he borrowed a pistol from a friend. He shot the Arab with it.

The third part takes place in captivity. Meursault was arrested and an investigation is underway. A judicial official interrogates the criminal with passion, not understanding the motive for the murder. In prison, the hero understands that it is useless to make excuses, and no one will understand him. But the reader learns the true meaning of his behavior only in the part where the sinner had to repent to the priest. Spiritual father came to the prisoner with a sermon, but he began to become inflamed and categorically deny the religious paradigm of thinking. His ideology is concentrated in this confession.

The main characters and their characteristics

Meursault– the main character of the novel “The Outsider”, a young man, an office worker living in a French colony. His last name can be read not as Mersault, but as Meursault - which translated means “death” and “sun”. He is rejected and misunderstood by society as a romantic character, but his loneliness is a proudly conscious choice. In addition, he is united with romanticism by unity with the natural world: they act and live in unison, and for the sake of feeling this harmony, he does not want to leave the sea. Camus believed that man is absolutely alone in this world, and his life path does not have the meaning laid down by God. Nature is not for him, not against him, she is simply indifferent to him (and Meursault is likened to it). There is no higher mind, there is only the will of the individual to recognize the chaos and randomness of the universe, and also to find meaning for oneself in action or reaction, in general, to diversify one’s existence. This is exactly what Sisyphus, the hero of a philosophical essay by the same author, did. He dragged the stone up the mountain in vain and knew it, but he received satisfaction from his rebellion against the gods, not pacified by their punishment. The writer put the same idea into the image of the Outsider: he is content with the knowledge that he is right and meets death with indifference. This is a logical ending, because all his actions occur as if automatically, dispassionately and unconsciously. Automatism in the work is divided into the reasons that gave rise to it: physiological habit and social tradition. It is precisely the main character who has reason number one, he accurately records natural phenomena and reacts with it, like a domino element. Instead of reasoning, he describes in detail and monotonously the heat, the coolness of the sea, the pleasure of contemplating the heavens, etc. Camus aggravates the protocol style with a demonstrative tautology: in the second paragraph “I’ll leave by a two-hour bus and still be there before dark”; in the third paragraph: “I left on a two-hour bus”). But the narrator’s bare, dry enumeration means not only the absence of meaning, but also what is given to a person instead of meaning - automatism - what is the apathy that binds him. He writes like an automaton: unartistically, illogically and without trying to please. He is best characterized by the repeated quote “I don’t care.” The only thing he cares about is the joys of the flesh: food, sleep, relationships with Marie.
Marie– an ordinary pretty girl, colleague of the main character. She meets him on the beach, and later they begin an affair. She is pretty, slim, and loves to swim. A young woman dreams of getting married and building her life; traditional values dominate her worldview. She clings to Meursault, tries to cling to him, she does not have the courage and intelligence to admit to herself that her lover is one with nature in a state of indifference to people and passions. Therefore, Marie does not notice the oddities of her boyfriend and, even after the murder he committed, does not want to let go of her rosy illusions about marriage. In her image, the author showed how limited, petty and ordinary human aspirations are, suppressed by a conservative paradigm of thinking, where an imaginary order is nestled in a sand castle.
Raymond- “friend” of the main character. He gets along with people easily, but not strongly, he is sociable, active and talkative. This is a reckless, frivolous man with criminal inclinations. He beats a woman, buys her love, carries a weapon and is not afraid to use it. His protest behavior, violating all the canons and rules of the country where he is located, also expresses a certain thought. The author sees in him Meursault's double, who, unlike the original, has dulled intuition and no connection with nature. He fills the void created in an apathetic friend who does not recognize anything with base passions and forbidden entertainments. Raymond is embedded in society and plays by its rules, although he contradicts them. He is not aware of existential nausea and does not openly rebel, since there are still barriers in his mind that contain the essence.
Priest– embodied in pure symbolic image religious idea. The spiritual father preaches divine predestination, imposes a clear distinction between good and evil, indicates the existence of a fair heavenly court, the gates of heaven, and the like. He calls on Meursault to repent and believe in the possibility of atonement for sin and eternal salvation, which infuriates the prisoner. An orderly world order, where everything is weighed and thought out, does not fit in with what Camus experienced and saw in his lifetime. Therefore, he believed that the idea of God had lost its relevance, and it was no longer possible for humanity to deceive itself by his “God’s will.” In support of this idea, the philosopher describes an accidental murder, not motivated or planned in any way, moreover, not mourned and not causing repentance and justification.
Image of the sun. Among the pagans, the sun (horos, hors or yarilo) is the god of fertility. This is a very capricious and cruel god, who, for example, melted the Snow Maiden in a folk Slavic legend (which Ostrovsky later played in his play). The pagans were highly dependent on climatic conditions and were afraid of angering the luminary, whose help was necessary for a good harvest. It was this that forced Meursault to kill; the hero is also attached to nature and dependent on it: he is the only one who watches it. Existentialism is closely related to paganism in the thesis “existence is primary.” At the moment of the fight, the sun became, as it were, an illumination for a person, a borderline state that shed light on his worldview.

Issues

The questions of the search for the meaning of life and nihilism in the novel “The Outsider” are the main problems raised by the author. Camus is a thinker of the 20th century, when the collapse of moral norms and values in the minds of millions of Europeans represented the facts of our time. Of course, nihilism as a consequence of the crisis religious tradition, manifested itself in different cultures, but history has never known such an acute conflict, such a global destruction of all foundations. Nihilism of the 20th century is the derivation of all consequences from the “death of God”. Promethean rebellion, heroic “self-overcoming”, aristocracy of the “chosen” - these themes of Nietzsche were picked up and modified by existentialist philosophers. The Thinker gave them new life in The Myth of Sisyphus and continued to work with them in The Outsider.
Crisis of faith. The author considers religious faith to be a lie, justified only by the fact that it is supposedly for the good. Faith reconciles a person with the meaninglessness of existence dishonestly, taking away the clarity of vision, closing his eyes to the truth. Christianity interprets suffering and death as a person's debt to God, but does not provide evidence that people are debtors. They are obliged to take at their word the dubious assertion that children's children... are responsible for the sins of their fathers. What did the fathers do if everyone pays, and the debt only grows over the years? Camus thinks clearly and distinctly, rejecting the ontological argument - from the fact that we have the idea of God, we cannot deduce his existence. “The absurd has much more in common with common sense,” the author wrote in 1943. “It is associated with nostalgia, longing for a lost paradise. From the presence of this nostalgia we cannot derive the lost paradise itself.” The requirements for clarity of vision presuppose honesty with oneself, the absence of any tricks, the rejection of humility, and loyalty to direct experience, into which one cannot bring anything beyond what is given.
Problems of permissiveness and authenticity of choice. However, from absurdity follows the denial of moral and ethical standards. Camus concludes that “everything is permitted.” The only value becomes the completeness of the experience. Chaos does not need to be destroyed by suicide or a “leap” of faith, it needs to be eliminated as completely as possible. There is no original sin in man, and the only scale for assessing its existence is the authenticity of choice.
Problems arising from the absurdity of reality: the unfair and frankly stupid sentence of Meursault, based on the fact that he did not cry at the funeral, the absurd revenge of the Arabs, which led to the death of innocent people, etc.

What is the meaning of the story?

If Nietzsche offered a myth of “eternal return” to humanity, which had lost its Christian faith, then Camus offers a myth of self-affirmation - with maximum clarity of mind, with an understanding of the fate that has fallen. A person must bear the burden of life without resigning himself to it - dedication and the fullness of existence are more important than all peaks, an absurd person chooses rebellion against all gods. This idea formed the basis of The Outsider.

Albert Camus' anti-clerical rebellion and polemic with Christianity are expressed in the final scene, where we do not recognize Meursault: he almost attacked the priest. The confessor imposes on the criminal a different understanding of the universe - ordered and mythological. He preaches traditional religious tenets, where man is a servant of God who must live, choose and die according to his commandments. However, the hero, like the author, opposes this value system with his absurd consciousness. He does not believe that in the accumulation of incoherent and scattered elements there is some kind of providence, and even translated by people into feelings. No force punishes or rewards, there is no justice and harmony, all these are just abstractions invented by a helpful brain in order to diversify the aimless earthly path to nowhere. The meaning of the story “The Outsider” is the affirmation of a new worldview, where man is abandoned by God, the world is indifferent to him, and his very appearance is an interweaving of accidents. There is no predestination, there is existence, a tangled knot that guides the threads of life. What happened here and now is what matters, because we will no longer have another place and time. We must accept it as it is, without creating false idols and vale of heaven. Fate does not make us, we make it, as well as many factors that do not depend on each other and are controlled by chance.

The hero comes to the conclusion that life is not worth fighting for, since sooner or later he is still destined to leave the world into oblivion, and it doesn’t matter when this happens. He will die misunderstood, alone and in the same cell, but named differently. But his thoughts have become clearer, and he will face death calmly and courageously. He has achieved an understanding of the world and is ready to leave it.

The author himself commented on the main character in the novel as follows: “He is the Jesus that our humanity deserves.” He draws an analogy with Christ, because society does not accept both heroes and takes their life for this. In essence, their verdict is the unwillingness of people to understand their idea. It’s easier for them to kill the mission than to strain their brains and souls. However, the biblical martyr is too ideal for our world and is not worth it. He is divorced from reality to the same extent as his utopian ideas about equality and justice, bequeathed by the Heavenly Father. The one who really suits the lovers public execution, - this is Meursault, because at least he doesn’t care what happens to them, and this is worse than the sacrificial love of Christ, but better than the cruelty and aggression of the executioners. He brings to humanity not bright hopes of resurrection, but a harsh and uncompromising destruction of his way of thinking, which does not bring any joy other than clarity of vision, existential insight. Therefore, his tormentors are quite rightly angry and indignant, trying to strangle the harsh truth of life.

Criticism

It is known that critics received the novel favorably; after all, the ideas of existentialism had already gained popularity in intellectual circles by that time. The critic G. Picon responded especially enthusiastically and passionately:

If, after a few centuries, only this short story remained as evidence of modern man, then it would be enough, just as reading “René” by Chateaubriand is enough to get acquainted with a man of the era of romanticism

The book was analyzed by Jean Paul Sartre, a more radical theorist of existentialism. He made a detailed analysis of the text, giving a clear and extraordinary interpretation of the events described. People accustomed to classical literature find the modernist story “The Outsider” difficult, if only due to its unusually illogical and sometimes simply mocking syntax

The narrative here is fragmented into countless sentences, syntactically extremely simplified, barely correlated with each other, closed in on themselves and self-sufficient - a kind of linguistic “islands”

Many compare this style of presentation with an essay on the topic “How I spent my summer holidays.” “Intermittent succession of chopped phrases”, “refusal of cause-and-effect connectives”, “use of simple sequence connectives” (“a”, “but”, “then”, “and at this moment”) - Sartre lists the signs of a “childish” style Meursault. The critic R. Barthes defines it through the metaphor “zero degree of writing”:

This transparent language, first used by Camus in The Stranger, creates a style based on the idea of absence, which turns into almost a complete absence of style itself.

The critic S. Velikovsky in “The Facets of Unhappy Consciousness” mentions that the hero is in many respects similar to a feeble-minded or mentally ill person:

Notes from an “outsider” are like a garland of light bulbs that light up alternately: the eye is blinded by each successive flash and does not detect the movement of current along the wire

The critic also focuses on the satirical subtext of the work, listing those aspects of our life that are ridiculed by the author in the second part of the work:

Through the dumbfounded surprise of the “outsider” comes Camus’s own mockery of dead language and the ritual of dead protective officialdom, only pretending to be meaningful life activity.

American sociologist Erich Fromm, in his study “A Lonely Man,” also makes a remark about the phenomenon of Camus’s protagonist, using his example to explain the essence of the new ostentatious morality and life brought to the point of automatism:

In modern capitalist society, alienation becomes almost all-encompassing - it permeates a person’s attitude to his work, to the objects he uses; extends to the state, to the people around him, to himself. The relationship between two is the relationship between two abstractions, two living machines using each other.

Interesting? Save it on your wall!

Composition

Composition
IN literary respect The 20th century has become a century spiritual search. Abundance literary movements, which arose at that time, is closely related to the abundance of new philosophical doctrines throughout the world. A striking example to this is French existentialism, the representative of which is the outstanding thinker and writer, laureate Nobel Prize 1957 Albert Camus...

Existentialism (from the Latin existentia - existence) is one of the directions of the philosophy of subjective idealism. The main category in existentialism is the concept of existence, which is identified with the subjective experiences of a person and is declared primary in relation to being. Existentialism opposes society to a person as something alien, hostile, which destroys his individuality and limits personal freedom. According to existentialists, the main goal scientific progress There should be not development of intelligence, but emotional education.

Existentialism, which arose after the First World War in Germany, and during the Second World War in France, draws its ideological origins from the teachings of the Danish scientist and irrationalist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. The main provisions of the existentialists are expressed in the works of J. P. Sartre, a French writer, philosopher and publicist, who is considered the head of French existentialism. The main themes of his work are loneliness, the search for absolute freedom and the absurdity of existence. Albert Camus is called his student and follower.

Philosophical works and the artistic works of Albert Camus complement each other, and his theoretical works interpret the essence of existence and provide the key to understanding it works of art. In Camus's essays, prose and drama, there are invariably thoughts about the absurd (“absurdity reigns”), about the omnipotence of death (“knowing yourself is knowing death”), a feeling of loneliness and alienation from the “disgusting” outside world (“everything is alien to me”) . Camus called the entire first period of his work “the cycle of the absurd.” At this time, he wrote the story “The Stranger” (1942), the philosophical essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942), and the dramas “Caligula” and “Misunderstanding” (1944). All of them reveal the absurdity of human existence and life in general.

The culture of the Mediterranean, which was perceived by him as the basis of the early pantheistic concept of personality, had a huge influence on the formation of Camus’s views and on all his work. It was based on an almost deified "belief in the joy of being, the identification of God and nature, in which the divine principle is dissolved. A fascination with pagan cultures and pre-Christian testaments was reflected in the collection "Marriage". Gradually, under the influence of historical events, Camus moves to the concept of the absurd man, which will predetermine everything the writer's growing interest in existentialism. The concept of the absurd man was developed in detail by Camus in the essay "The Myth of Sisyphus" and the story "The Stranger". Through the prism of these two books, it is not difficult to imagine the range of issues and perspectives considered by the school of literature of existentialism, which developed in France in the 40s years of the last century.

“The Myth of Sisyphus” is an “essay on the absurd”, in which Albert Camus, having collected his thoughts on death, alienation even from himself, the impossibility of defining, deciphering existence, about absurdity as a source of freedom, assigns the role of the hero of the absurd world to the legendary Sisyphus. The work of Sisyphus is absurd, aimless; he knows that the stone, which, at the behest of the gods, is being dragged up the mountain, will roll down and everything will start all over again. But the fact of the matter is that he knows - which means he rises above the gods, above his fate, which means the stone becomes his business. Knowledge is enough; it guarantees freedom. The protagonist's behavior is determined by an all-powerful absurdity that devalues the action.

The story “The Outsider” is a kind of confession of the main character. All the space in it is occupied by a single choice, which is made by the only hero of the novel. Meursault talks about himself all the time. This constant "I" emphasizes the lack of community of people, " collective history", needs in other people.

Camus's hero is “not of this world” because he belongs to a completely different world - the world of nature. It is no coincidence that at the moment of the murder he feels himself to be part of the cosmic landscape, suggesting that his movements were directed by the sun itself. But even before this moment, Meursault appears as a natural person who can look at the sky for a long time and without any reason. Meursault is like an alien on our planet, an alien, and his home planet is the sea and the sun. Meursault is a romantic, but a “romantic existentialist.” The blinding sun of Algeria illuminates the actions of the hero, which cannot be reduced to social motivations for behavior, to a rebellion against formal morality. The murder in The Outsider is another "unmotivated crime". Meursault is on a par with Raskolnikov. The difference between them is that Meursault no longer asks about the boundaries of the possible - it goes without saying that for him everything is possible. He is absolutely free, “everything is permitted” to him. ““Everything is permitted” by Ivan Karamazov is the only expression of freedom,” Albert Camus himself believed (from his youth he was engrossed in Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Malraux).

The title of Camus' story is symbolic. It captures the protagonist’s attitude. And the narration, conducted in the first person, gives the author the opportunity to acquaint readers with his way of thinking, to understand the essence of his “outsiderness”. The fact is that Meursault is indifferent to life in its in the usual sense. He discards all its dimensions except the only one - his own existence. In this existence, the usual norms do not apply: telling a woman that you love her; cry at your mother's funeral; think about the consequences of your actions. Here you can not pretend and lie, but say and do what existence itself leads to, without thinking about tomorrow, because only psychological motivations are the only true motivations for human behavior. Camus's hero does not solve any social issues; does not protest against anything. For him there are no socio-historical circumstances at all. The only thing Meursault is sure of is that death will soon come to him.

“Meursault does not recognize the most important commandments and therefore has no right to expect mercy.” But he is absolutely indifferent to this, because he knows that nothing matters, that life is not worth “clinging to”: “Well, I’ll die. Earlier than others, that's for sure. But everyone knows that life is not worth clinging to. In essence, it doesn’t matter much whether you die at thirty or at seventy - in both cases, other people, men and women, will live, and this has been going on for many millennia.”

Meursault does not live - he exists, without a “plan”, without an idea, from case to case, from one moment to another. In “The Stranger Explained” (1943), J. P. Sartre emphasized how the narrative is constructed: “Every phrase is a momentary moment... every phrase is like an island. And we move in leaps and bounds from phrase to phrase, from non-existence to non-existence.”

Death as a manifestation of the absurdity of existence is the basis for the liberation of Camus’s hero from responsibility to people. He is liberated, does not depend on anyone, and does not want to associate himself with anyone. He is an outsider in relation to life, which seems to him an absurd collection of all kinds of rituals; he refuses to perform these rituals. Much more important than any principles and obligations, duty and conscience for Meursault is that at the time he committed the murder it was unbearably hot, and his head hurt terribly, that “the sun sparkled on the steel of the knife... and Meursault seemed to have been hit in the forehead with a long sharp blade, a ray I burned my eyelashes, dug into my pupils and it hurt my eyes.” Thus, the conflict in Camus’ story is located on the axis of the collision between human automatons performing rituals and a living being who does not want to perform them. A tragic outcome is inevitable here. It is difficult to combine your own egoistic existence and movement human masses making history. Meursault resembles both a pagan liberated personality who fell out of the bosom of the church, and an extra person, and an outsider, who took shape in literature in the second half of the 20th century.

Camus himself pointed out the double - metaphysical and social - meaning of the novel, explaining Meursault’s strange behavior primarily by his reluctance to submit to life “according to fashion catalogues.”

Camus saw the plot of “The Stranger” in “distrust of formal morality.” The clash of a “just a person” with a society that forcibly “catalogs” everyone, places everyone within the framework of rules, established norms, generally accepted views, becomes open and irreconcilable in the second part of the novel. Meursault went beyond this framework - he is tried and condemned.

The image of the “outsider”, created by Albert Camus, gave rise to many different interpretations in his time. Was it accepted by wartime European intelligentsia circles? as a new “Ecclesiastes” (this was facilitated by the author’s statement about his hero: “The only Christ we deserve”). French criticism drew a parallel between the “outsider” and the youth of 1939 and 1969, since both were a kind of outsiders and in rebellion they were looking for a way out of loneliness.

Parallels can be drawn endlessly, because history contains many examples when a person acutely felt his loneliness and restlessness, suffering from the “irregularity”, “curvature” of the world around him. These feelings arise whenever there is general alienation in society, when human existence is reduced to the indifferent implementation of certain norms and rules, and anyone who refuses to follow the established order, not accepting selfishness, indifference and formalism, becomes a “stranger,” an outcast, “ to outsiders."

THE CONCEPT OF ALIENATION OF THE PERSON AND SOCIETY IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF ALBERT CAMUS

(using the example of the story “The Outsider”)

Scientific essay by 3rd year student of the Faculty of Foreign Philology, group 341 Moldovan Elena

Kherson State Pedagogical University

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION OF UKRAINE

Kherson -1998

INTRODUCTION

Albert Camus is one of the moralists in modern French literature of the twentieth century

1.0. For a long time, the culture of France was generous with “moralists,” that is, edifiers, moral teachers, and preachers of virtue. First of all, these are masters of the pen and thinkers who discuss in their books the mysteries of human nature with witty directness, like Montaigne in the 16th century, Pascal and La Rochefoucauld in the 17th century, Walter, Diderot, Rousseau in the 18th century. France of the 20th century put forward another constellation of such moralists: Saint-Exupéry, Malraux, Satre... Albert Camus should rightfully be named among the first among these big names. In his work, he examined the concept of alienation of the individual and society. He is the herald of many disparate little chips, which, in a world split into camps, are frantically searching for their own middle path. In his works, he adhered to the conclusions of the “philosophy of existence”, existentialism. To understand life means, according to Camus, to discern the face of Fate itself behind its changing, unreliable faces and interpret it in the light of the final evidence of our earthly destiny. All of Camus’s books claim to be tragedies of metaphysical insight: in them the mind strives to break through the thickness of the transient, through the everyday-historical layer to the rectangular existential truth of the existence of the individual on earth.

1.1. One of these books includes Camus’s work “The Stranger,” about which thousands of pages have already been written. It aroused keen interest both in France and far beyond its borders. But even today, more than forty years after its publication, the book continues to be read, it remains a bestseller in France. “The Stranger” has become firmly established in lyceum and university courses, where it is interpreted as a “major date” in the history of French literature. This book by Camus is called " best novel generation of Camus", and "one of the great philosophical myths in the art of this century" and even one of the most exciting, convincing and the best way constructed novels in world literature.

1.2. The literature on “The Outsider” is so diverse that familiarity with it gives a fairly complete idea of the possibilities of various directions in the methodology of modern Western literary criticism. The story has been subject to different kinds of reading - metaphysical, existentialistic, biographical, political and sociological. Representatives of many fields of knowledge addressed her.

CHAPTER I. General provisions

2.1. The creative history of The Stranger can be traced quite easily through Camus's Notebooks. He notes that the main character of the story is a person who does not want to make excuses. He prefers the idea that people have of him. He dies, content with his own consciousness of being right. It is noteworthy that already in this first entry the word “truth” sounds like a key word, in June 1937. a sketch of a topic appeared about a man sentenced to death. The prisoner is paralyzed with fear, but does not seek any consolation. He dies with his eyes full of tears. In July 1937 a record appears again about a man who defends a certain faith all his life. His mother dies. He gives up everything. In August 1937 an entry appears in his diaries: “a man who was looking for his life where it usually goes (marriage, position in society). One day he realized how alien he was to his own life. He is characterized by a refusal to compromise and a belief in the truth of nature.” (4, 135)

2.2. According to Camus's notes, the hero is the keeper of the truth, but which one? After all, this man is strange, as the title of the novel, “The Outsider,” somehow hinted at.

When The Outsider was published, a whole generation eagerly read this book - a generation whose life did not rest on traditional foundations, was closed, devoid of a future, just like the life of “The Outsider.” The youth made Meursault their hero.

2.3. As Camus wrote, the main problem was absurdity. The main thing that determines Meursault’s behavior, the writer believed, is the refusal to lie.

Meursault's psychology, his behavior, his truth are the result of Camus's long reflections on the aesthetics of the absurd, which in its own way reflected his own life observations.

2.3.1. “The Outsider” is a complex work, its hero “eludes” from an unambiguous interpretation; the greatest difficulty in the story lies in its two-dimensionality. The story is divided into two equal, overlapping parts.

The second is a mirror of the first, but the mirror is crooked. Once experienced during a trial, the “copy” distorts the nature beyond recognition. On the one hand, Camus strives to show the collision " ordinary person“face to face with fate, from which there is no protection - and this is the metaphysical plane of the novel. On the other hand, with his negativism, Meursault trusts generally accepted values in order to condemn external lies with his inner truth.

2.3.2. The genre of the novel is close to a moralistic novel, therefore the author’s philosophical and aesthetic system is inseparable from his personality. The completeness of The Stranger is given by its philosophical overtones. In The Stranger, Camus strives to give history the universal character of a myth, where life is initially marked by the stamp of the absurd. The reality here is rather a metaphor necessary to reveal the image of Meursault.

2.3.3. The life of a young hero on the city outskirts of Alsher flows mechanically and measuredly. The service of a petty clerk in an office, empty and monotonous, is interrupted by the joy of Meursault’s return to the beaches “drenched in the sun, to the colors of the evening southern sky.” Life here, under the pen of Camus, appears with its “wrong side” and its “face”. The very name of the hero contains for the author the opposite of the essence: “death” and “sun”. The tragedy of the human lot, woven from joy and pain, and here, with the inaccessibility of the law, covers all circles of the hero’s life.” (1, 140)

Meursault does not demand much from life and in his own way he is happy. It should be noted that among the possible titles of the novel, Camus noted in his drafts “The Happy Man,” “An Ordinary Man,” and “The Indifferent.” Meursault is a modest, compliant and benevolent, albeit without much cordiality, person. Nothing distinguishes him from among the inhabitants of the poor suburbs of Algeria, except for one oddity - he is surprisingly simple-minded and indifferent to everything that is usually of interest to people.

2.3.4. The life of an Algerian is reduced by Camus to the level of immediate sensory sensations.

He sees no reason to change his life when the owner of the office invites him to think about a career where an interesting job has been found for him. Meursault has already been to Paris, he does not have the slightest ambition or hopes. After all, he believes that life cannot be changed; this or that life is ultimately equivalent.

But, once at the beginning of his life, Meursault studied, was a student and, like everyone else, made plans for the future. But he had to give up his studies, and then he very soon realized that all his dreams essentially had no meaning. Meursault turned away from what had previously seemed full of meaning. He plunged into the abyss of indifference.

2.3.5. Probably, it is here that we must look for the reason for Meursault’s astonishing insensibility, the secret of his strangeness. But Camus is silent about this until the last pages, until that key scene in the novel when, enraged by the harassment of the priest, Meursault feverishly shouts out the words of his faith in the face of the church minister: “I I was right, I am right now, I am always right. I lived like this, but I lived differently. I did this and didn't do that. So what? I lived gloriously in anticipation of that moment of pale dawn when my truth would be revealed. From the abyss of my future, throughout my absurd torment, a breath of darkness rose in me through the years that had not yet come, it leveled everything in its path, everything that was accessible to my life - such an unreal, such a ghostly life. (2, 356). The curtain has been lifted on Meursault's mystery: death is an irresistible and meaningless fact that lies at the core of truth.

2.3.6. The secret of the hero’s “individual” lies in the conclusions he left, realizing the finitude and absurdity of life. He wants to simply be, live and feel today, here on earth, to live in the “eternal present.” However, everything else that connects a person with others - morality, ideas, creativity - is devalued and meaningless for Meursault. Salvation for the hero may be to extinguish consciousness, not to be aware of himself, to break the formal connection with others. Meursault chooses detachment, separates from society, becomes a “stranger.” His mind seems to be shrouded in a slight fog, and even when reading the initial chapters of the novel, one gets the impression that the hero is in a state of half-asleep.

Although, the word “absurd” appears in the novel only once at the end last chapter, already the first pages of “The Outsider” introduce the reader into an atmosphere of absurdity that does not cease to thicken until the last scene.

2.4. The story is told in the first person, and at the same time it is paradoxically indifferent. The conversational mediocrity and naked directness of this defiantly poor vocabulary, emphatically monotonous in structure, seemingly artless stringing together of the simplest phrases is aptly designated by one of the interpreters of “The Outsider” as “zero degree of writing.” The narratives here are divided into countless sentences, syntactically extremely simplified, barely correlated with each other, closed in on themselves and self-sufficient - a kind of linguistic “islands”. (Sartre) (1, 390)

2.5. “The Stranger” Camus serves as an example for everyone who is inclined to judge a work, a writer based on the narrative, the style, the form; if it is complicated, “broken,” then it is a modernist, and if it is simple, if it has a certain integrity, then it is a realist. Moreover, if everything is written so simply in such transparent language.

What is the main idea of the story? Serenely indifferent, inert Meursault - a man who was not brought out of his sleepy balance even by the murder he committed, one day he nevertheless fell into a frenzy. This happened exactly in key scene novel, when the prison priest tried to return the hero to the bosom of the church, to introduce him to the belief that everything turns according to the will of God. And Meursault pushed the priest out the door of his cell. But why was it the priest who caused this paroxysm of rage in him, and not the cruel one who drove him into a dead end to follow, not the bored judge who sentenced him to death, not the unceremonious public staring at him like a lonely animal? Yes, because they all only affirmed Meursault in his idea of the essence of life, and only the priest, who called for trust in divine mercy, to trust in divine providence, unfolded before them a picture of harmonious, logical, predetermined existence. And this picture threatened to shake the idea of the world - the kingdom of the absurd, the world - primordial chaos.

The view of life as something meaningless is a modernist view. Therefore, “The Stranger” is a classic work for modernism.

CHAPTER II . Direct analysis of the work

3.1. It is noteworthy that there is almost no development of action in the novel. The life of Meursault - a modest inhabitant from a dusty suburb of Algeria - does not stand out much from hundreds of others like her, since it is an everyday life, nondescript, and boring. And the shot was an impetus in this half-asleep vegetation, it was a kind of flash that transported Meursault to another plane, space, to another dimension, destroying his meaningless vegetable existence.

3.2. It should be noted main feature Meursault is a complete absence of hypocrisy, a reluctance to lie and pretend, even if this goes against his own benefit. This trait manifests itself primarily when he receives a telegram about the death of his mother in the almshouse. The formal text of the telegram from the orphanage puzzles him; he does not quite understand and accept that his mother has died. For Meursault, his mother died much earlier, namely: when he placed her in an almshouse, leaving the care of her to the employees of the institution. Therefore, the sad event and the detachment and indifference with which it is perceived by the main character enhances the sense of absurdity.

3.3. In the nursing home, Meursault again does not understand the need to follow the established principle and create at least the appearance, the illusion of compassion. Meursault vaguely feels that he is being condemned for placing his mother in an almshouse. He tried to justify himself in the eyes of the director, but he beat him to it: “You couldn’t take her as a dependent. She needed a nurse, and you receive a modest salary. And in the end she lived better here.” (1, 142). However, in a shelter for the elderly, they do not act in accordance with the desires, requests, habits of the elderly - only with the old routine and rules. A step aside was unacceptable, the only exceptions were in rare cases, and even then with preliminary excuses. As happened in the case of Perez, when he was allowed to participate in the funeral procession, since in the shelter he was considered the groom of the deceased.

For Meursault, the voices of old people entering the shelter morgue sound like “the muffled chatter of parrots,” the nurses have “a white gauze bandage” instead of a face, and on the elderly faces instead of eyes, among a thick network of wrinkles, there is “only a dim light.” Perez faints like a “broken finger.” The participants in the funeral procession look like mechanical dolls, rapidly replacing each other in an absurd game.

The mechanical coexists with the comic in “The Stranger,” which further emphasizes the hero’s alienation from his surroundings: the procession manager is “a little man in a white robe,” Perez is “an old man with an actor’s appearance,” Perez’s nose is “dotted with black dots,” he has “huge flabby and protruding ears, and also purple in color.” Perez scurries around, cutting corners to keep up with the coffin attendants. His tragicomic appearance contrasts with the dignified appearance of the director of the orphanage, who is equally ridiculous in his inhuman “officiality.” He doesn’t make a single unnecessary gesture, he doesn’t even wipe the sweat from his forehead and face.” (4, 172)

3.4. But Meursault is not involved, detached from the action taking place before his eyes, the funeral rite. This ritualism is alien to him, he simply fulfills his duty, showing with all his appearance that he is doing exactly this, without even trying to hide his detached, indifferent look. But Meursault’s detachment is selective. If the hero’s consciousness does not perceive social rituals, then it is very alive in relation to the natural world. The hero perceives his surroundings through the eyes of the poet, he subtly feels the colors, smells of nature, and hears subtle sounds. A play of light, a painting of a landscape, separate part Camus's material world conveys the hero's state. Here Meursault is a selfless admirer of the elements - earth, sea, sun. The landscape also mysteriously connects the son with the mother. Meursault understands his mother's attachment to the places where she loved to walk. (2, 356)

It is thanks to nature that the connection between people - the inhabitants of the shelter - is renewed, which is incomprehensibly broken in everyday life.

3.5. In the second part of the story, there is a rearrangement of the hero’s vital forces and the transformation of his ordinary, everyday life into the life of a villain and criminal. He is called a moral monster because he neglected his filial duty and sent his mother to an almshouse. The evening of the next day spent with a woman, at the cinema, in the courtroom is interpreted as sacrilege; the fact that he was on friendly terms with a neighbor who did not have a very clean past indicates that Meursault was involved in a criminal underworld. In the courtroom, defendants can escape the feeling that they are trying someone else who vaguely resembles a familiar face, but not himself. And Meursault is sent to the scaffold, in essence, not for the murder he committed, but for the fact that he neglected the hypocrisy from which “duty” is woven. (4, 360)

3.5.1. It seems that Meursault’s trial is not for a physical crime - the murder of an Arab, but for moral crime over which the earthly court, the human court, has no power. In this, a person is his own judge; only Meursault himself should have felt a measure of responsibility for what he did. And the question of whether Meursault loved his mother should not have been openly discussed, debated in the courtroom, much less the most compelling argument for imposing a death sentence. But for Meursault there is no abstract feeling of love; he is extremely “grounded” and lives by the feeling of the present, fleeting time. The dominant influence on Meursault’s nature is his physical needs, it is they that determine his feelings.

Consequently, the word “love” for the “Stranger” has no meaning, since it belongs to the vocabulary of formal ethics; he knows about love only that it is a mixture of desire, tenderness and understanding, connecting it with someone.” (4, 180)

3.5.2. The only thing that is not alien to the “outsider” is the taste for bodily “vegetative” joys, needs, and desires. He is indifferent to almost everything that goes beyond the healthy need for sleep, food, intimacy with a woman. This is confirmed by the fact that the day after the funeral he went to swim in the port and met the typist Marie there. And they calmly swim and have fun and, in particular, Meursault does not experience any remorse that should naturally arise in him regarding the death of his mother. His indifferent attitude towards this turning point in the life of every person constitutes a gradually increasing sense of the absurdity of a seemingly real work.

3.5.3. So, thoughtlessly, without knowing the goal, the detached Meursault wanders through life, looking at it like a man of the absurd.

In Meursault’s crime, the decisive factors were the forces of nature, which Meursault so worshiped. This “unbearable” scorching sun, which made the landscape inhuman and oppressive. A symbol of peace and tranquility - the sky becomes hostile to man, representing an accomplice, accomplice in crime.

The landscape here, that is, in the arena of crime, is a hot plain, and a closed space where Meursault is at the mercy of the cruel rays of the sun and from where there is no way out, so the main character feels trapped, trying to break through this veil and hopelessness. The hostile elements incinerate Meursault’s body and spirit, create an atmosphere of fatal violence, and drag the victim into its abyss, from where there is no way back. In an allegorical sense, the sun becomes Meursault’s executioner, raping his will. Meursault feels on the edge of madness (at this moment characteristic feature man in the works of modernists). To break out of the circle of violence and evil, an explosion is needed, and it happens. And this explosion is the murder of an Arab.

The scene of the murder of the Arab is a turning point in the composition of The Stranger. This chapter divides the novel into two equal parts, facing one another. In the first part - Meursault's story about his life before meeting the Arabs on the beach, in the second - Meursault's story about his stay in prison, about the investigation and trial of him.

“The meaning of the book,” Camus wrote, “consists solely in the parallelism of the two parts.” The second part is a mirror, but one that distorts Meursault’s truth beyond recognition. There is a gap between the two parts of The Stranger, which evokes in readers a sense of absurdity; the disproportion between how Meursault sees life and how the judges see it becomes the leading asymmetry in the artistic system of The Stranger. (1, 332)

3.5.4. In the courtroom, the investigator furiously imposes Christian repentance and humility on Meursault. He cannot admit the idea that Meursault does not believe in God, in Christian morality; the only morality for him that is effective and fair is ratio and the phenomena and processes surrounding it. He does not believe in what cannot be verified, seen, felt. Therefore, in the courtroom, Meursault will appear in the guise of the Antichrist. And here comes the verdict: “the chairman of the court announced in a rather strange form that in the name of French people My head will be cut off in the city square.” (1, 359)

While awaiting execution, Meursault refuses to meet with the prison priest: the confessor is in the camp of his opponents. The lack of hope for salvation causes irresistible horror, the fear of death relentlessly haunts Meursault in his prison cell: he thinks about the guillotine, about the everyday nature of the execution. All night, without closing his eyes, the prisoner waits for dawn, which may be his last. Meursault is infinitely lonely and infinitely free, like a man who has no tomorrow.

Hopes and consolations from beyond the grave are not understood and are not acceptable to Meursault. He is far from despair and is faithful to the land, beyond which nothing exists. The painful conversation with the priest ends with a sudden outburst of Meursault’s anger. Meaninglessness reigns in life, no one is to blame for anything, or everyone is to blame for everything.

Meursault’s feverish speech, the only one throughout the novel where he reveals his soul, seems to have cleansed the hero of pain, banishing all hope. Meursault felt detachment from the world of people and his kinship with the spiritless and precisely for this reason beautiful world nature. For Meursault there is no longer a future, there is only a momentary present.

The circle of bitterness is closed at the end of the novel. Hunted down by the all-powerful mechanics of lies, “The Outsider” remained with his truth. Camus, apparently, wanted everyone to believe that Meursault was not guilty, although he killed a stranger, and if society sent him to the guillotine, it means it committed an even more terrible crime. Life in society is not organized righteously and inhumanely. And Camus the artist does a lot to inspire confidence in the negative truth of his hero. (4, 200)

3.5.5. The existing inert world order pushes Meursault to the desire to die, since he does not see a way out of the current order of things. Therefore, the last word of the novel still remains “hate.”

There is an sense of absurdity in Meursault’s fate: young and in love with “earthly delicacies,” the hero could find nothing but meaningless work in some office; deprived of funds, the son is forced to place his mother in an almshouse; after the funeral he must hide the joy of intimacy with Marie; he is being judged not for what he killed (there is essentially no talk about the murdered Arab), but because he did not cry at his mother’s funeral; on the verge of death, he is forced to turn to the god in whom he believes.

CONCLUSION. Camus’s contribution to world literature, the revelation of the “existentialist” personality when creating “The Stranger”

4.0. Going beyond the concepts that Camus needed to create the existentialist type of “innocent hero,” we are faced with the question: can murder be justified only on the basis that it happened by accident? The concept of the absurd not only accommodated the writer’s artistic vision, but also did not free the hero from his inherent vice of moral indifference. In the treatise “The Wandering Man,” Camus strictly evaluates what he will have to overcome over time. The feeling of the absurd, if one tries to derive a rule of action from it, makes murder at least indifferent and, therefore, possible. If there is nothing to believe in, if nothing makes sense and it is impossible to assert the value of anything, then everything is permissible and everything is unimportant. There are no pros and cons, the murderer is neither right nor wrong. Villainy or virtue is pure chance or whim.”

In The Stranger, Camus made an attempt to stand up for man. He freed the hero from falsehood, if we remember that freedom for Camus is the “right not to lie.” To express the feeling of the absurd, he himself achieved the highest clarity, Camus created typical image an era of anxiety and disappointment. The image of Meursault is also alive in the minds of modern French readers; for young people, this book serves as an expression of their rebellion.

And at the same time, Meursault is the freedom of a rebel who has closed the universe on himself. The final authority and judge remains a certain person, for whom the highest good is life “without tomorrow.” Struggling with formal morality, Camus placed the Algerian clerk “beyond good and evil.” He deprived his hero of human community and living morality. The love of life, presented from the perspective of the absurd, too obviously causes death. In “The Stranger,” one cannot help but feel Camus’s movement forward: this is a life-affirming rejection of despair and a persistent craving for justice.

While working on the novel, Camus had already solved the problem of freedom in its connection with the problem of truth.

Bibliography

1. Camus Albert. Favorites. Introductory article Velikovsky S., Moscow. Pravda Publishing House, 1990.

2. Camus Albert. Favorites. Collection. Preface by S. Velikovsky, Moscow. Publishing house "Rainbow", 1989.

3. Camus Albert. Selected works. Afterword by Velikovsky S., “Cursed Questions” by Camus. Moscow. Publishing house "Panorama", 1993.

4. Kushkin E.P., Albert Camus. Early years. Leningrad. Leningrad University Publishing House, 1982.

5. Zatonsky D. In our time. The book about foreign literature XX century Moscow. Publishing house "Prosveshcheniye", 1979.

Send your good work in the knowledge base is simple. Use the form below

Students, graduate students, young scientists who use the knowledge base in their studies and work will be very grateful to you.

Posted on http://www.allbest.ru/

The world of the absurd in the storyA.Camus"Outsider"»

As we know, in the years immediately following World War II, a popular movement known as existentialism came to the fore, first in Europe and then quickly spreading to the United States. The trend, as is known, was transformed in the depths of the French resistance to the German occupation, and its first prominent heralds were Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. J.-P. Sartre was a brilliant graduate of the Sorbonne who was to become an outstanding philosopher, writer and political journalist. A. Camus, a native of Algeria, became famous as a novelist and essayist. Both were awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, although Sartre refused to accept it. Camus' life ended tragically in a car accident when he was forty-six years old.

“Great literature is always existential, since it deals with being-in-the-world. Literature is psychology, the difference is that literature is based on fantasy, and psychology is based on facts.”

As S. Velikovsky states, “belonging to the circle of Sartre - although not strictly adhering to the conclusions of the philosophy of existence”, existentialism, but only sharing the mindset that fed it - Camus portrayed himself as a bastion of freedom and truth, a living reproach to the entire human race, poisoned by the “Caesarist - police frenzy."

The story "The Stranger" was completed in May 1940, but was published in 1942. She brought Camus wide fame and caused heated controversy around him.

While working on the story, Camus wrote in his diary that writing for him “is the real pursuit of philosophy, and literary fiction is the completion of philosophy, its illustration and crowning.”

Some literary scholars, in particular G. Friedlander and E. Kushkin, believe that Camus was inspired by “Crime and Punishment” by F. Dostoevsky.

While working on the story, Camus makes the following entry in his notebook: “<…>No one can break with the human crowd...” "The death penalty. A criminal is killed because crime depletes a person's ability to live. He lived through everything until he killed. He might die. Murder is exhausting." These are essentially the issues that are addressed in The Outsider. What is this story about? Let's call it "The Story of a Murder." A young Algerian employee, Meursault, receives a telegram about the death of his mother. This forces him to ask his boss for leave for two days and go to the almshouse where his mother spent her last years. There he behaves “differently” than one would expect: he falls out of the traditional “role” of a loving son, violates funeral rite and this incurs the reproaches of others for heartlessness. Returning to Algeria, the day after the funeral, Meursault meets on the beach with Marie, a typist who had previously worked with him in the same office, and she becomes his mistress. Meursault has a neighbor, Raymond Sintes, who is surrounded by bad reputation pimp. Nevertheless, Meursault gets along with him, becomes his friend and even helps him take revenge on his Arab lover who deceived him, and then testifies to the police in Raymond’s favor. The Arab woman's brother and his friends want to take revenge on Raymond, one of them wounds him. On the same day, Meursault, on his way to the stream in search of saving coolness, stumbles upon an Arab. Meursault is tormented by thirst and the sun is blinding, the Arab has a knife in his hands, and Meursault accidentally ends up with Raymond’s revolver in his pocket. Tormented by thirst and the sun, Meursault semi-instinctively pulls out a revolver and shoots at the Arab, and then mechanically continues to shoot, firing three more bullets into the motionless body.

For the murder of the Arab, Meursault is sentenced to death. The sentence is harsh, considering the fact that a Frenchman would hardly have been sentenced to death for the murder of an Arab in those days in colonial Algeria.

As S. Velikovsky notes, the narrator of “The Outsider” was alternately revealed as a villain and a great martyr, a stupid animal and a sage, a bastard and a robot, a hidden racist and a son of the people, a subman and a superman. “Camus was at first amazed,” writes S. Velikovsky, “then he became angry, and in the end he himself aggravated the confusion by saying, half-jokingly and half-seriously, that in his eyes this is “the only Christ we deserve.” The fact is that Christ, going to execution, was met with cries of hatred (Gospel). And A. Camus returned to this scene many times in his prose and essays.

It is completely clear to whom and to whom Meursault (the hero of the story) is an outsider - to the society in which he lives and to the people around him. He White crow, he is condemned because he does not play the game of those around him. A human society, as history shows, does not tolerate originality, does not accept those who stand out from the general gray mass; Moreover, people are just waiting for the right moment (when the “white crow” stumbles, makes the slightest mistake) to trample them into the mud, wipe them off the face of the earth. So in the case of Meursault, people seized this moment and dealt with him. Meursault was sentenced to death not only because he killed an Arab (in those days this was not considered serious crime! and was not punishable by death), but because he drank coffee at his mother’s coffin, did not cry at the funeral, and went to the cinema the next day. Only because of non-compliance with external standards of decency “in the name of the French people” will his head be cut off.

French critic Roland Barthes classified The Stranger as prose with “zero degree of writing.” The title of S. Velikovsky’s article on “The Outsider” in the author’s above-mentioned book echoes the definition given by R. Barth - “Zero degree of consciousness.” Samarius Velikovsky compares Meursault with Caligula: both of them exist at someone else’s expense and in the end they also bring death to the other, although with a caveat: the abandonment of the mother, the grief of Marie, the death of a random person they met only because his killer was in too much trouble. Of course, harm caused to “outsiders” is no match for the villainy of a fellow soul. “But strictly speaking, both of them are, in principle, birds of a feather.”

In the story “The Stranger,” the influence of F. Dostoevsky on A. Camus is obvious. Camus always considered Dostoevsky to be his teacher and role model. In particular, if we compare the hero of the novel “Crime and Punishment” by Raskolnikov and the story “The Stranger” by Meursault and try to find parallels, then we can say that their names are telling. They carry an additional semantic load. Thus, the surname Meursault represents opposite entities - “death” and “sun”. This is no coincidence, since Camus emphasizes the hero’s sincerity and openness, his love for nature. Meursault is a particle of nature, and he is contrasted in the story as a man of nature to a man of civilization. The surname Raskolnikov dates back to the time of Archpriest Avvakum and symbolizes struggle, eternal quest and rebellion.

What these two heroes have in common is that they killed a man. According to G. Friedlander, Meursault is a murderer, like Raskolnikov, and just like Raskolnikov, an extraordinary killer, although his crime has a different motivation, Meursault is also unlike Raskolnikov in his mental make-up: he lives a physical, sensual life, which is his again, it is not related to the fanatic of abstract thought, the martyr of the “idea” Raskolnikov. However, comprehending the fate of his hero, Camus deliberately returns in The Stranger to the plot scheme of Crime and Punishment.

Camus gave The Stranger the form of a confession. As is known, Dostoevsky also intended to write “Crime and Punishment” in the form of a confession or notes of the hero. However, we believe that Meursault is similar not so much to Raskolnikov, but to another character of F. Dostoevsky - the hero of Notes from Underground. In Camus's notebooks there are interesting entries that were obviously related to Camus' ideological quests. So, for example: “The most dangerous temptation is not to be like anyone else.” Obviously, these are sketches of a future story based on the character of Meursault. In another recording we hear echoes of a man “from the underground.” Let’s compare: “Whenever a person (“I”) gives in to his vanity, whenever a person thinks and lives to “appear,” he commits betrayal.” "<…>In my life I only brought to the extreme the fact that you did not dare even half, and even mistook cowardice for prudence, and thereby consoled yourself, deceiving yourself.

These records irrefutably confirm our idea that Meursault is more closely related to the rebel-individualist, the “underground worker” with the desire to simply live, and not be like a “common man,” than Raskolnikov, obsessed with the “idea.” And, as I. Shkunaeva rightly notes, Meursault is not aggressive and disinterested in aggression and self-interest. But on the other hand, he is actually indifferent and indifferent. Sometimes I can't believe that young man(Meursault is 30 years old) can be so indifferent to the social side of life.

“If I’m not for myself, then who is for me? If I’m only for myself, then why am I?” - this commandment is in many ways the opposite of the beliefs of a lonely human speck of dust in the wind harsh fates, too, was not born in vain, but has been tested and confirmed by more than one generation.

But if we accept the fact that the choice of life positions is dictated by time, circumstances, and that Nietzsche’s “Dionysian fad” is also a product of time, then we have serious concerns about the fate of humanity: if human activity on earth comes down only to the enjoyment of earthly goods, then such regression can lead to a moral decline of the individual, to purely physiological and biological attitudes. No matter how absurd the world is, no matter how “false” human society is, it cannot be renounced. Loneliness is not a human prerogative!

Bibliography

Camus's tale of absurdity

1. Velikovsky S. Facets of “unhappy consciousness” - M. “Iskusstvo”, 1973.

2. Velikovsky S. “Cursed Questions” by Camus (introductory article). In the book: Camus A., Selected. - M., Pravda Publishing House, 1990.

3. Dostoevsky F. Notes from the Underground. Full collection op. in 30 volumes. T. 5, - L., Publishing House "Science", 1973.

4. Camus A. Creativity and freedom. Comp. Dolgov K.M., Publishing house "Rainbow", 1990.

5. Friedlander G. Dostoevsky and world literature. - L., Publishing house " Soviet writer", 1985.

6. Hall K., Lindsay G. Personality Theory. - M., Publishing house "April-press" and "Eksmo-press", 1999.

7. Shkunaeva I. Modern French literature. - M., Publishing House "IMO", 1961.

8. Barthes R. Le Degré zero de l'ecriture, Paris, 1947.

Posted on Allbest.ru

...