Beauty In Crispin Sartwell's The Six Names Of Beauty

In his novel, The Six Names of Beauty, Crispin Sartwell describes beauty in the simplest of terms, “beauty is the object of longing” (3). That statement provides an intriguing juxtaposition with the existentialist viewpoint as, to them, nothing is of importance in our meaningless lives: beauty is not of any consequence. The passiveness exhibited by the character of Meursault links him further with the existentialist ideology. However, within the context of The Stranger these two seemingly competing ideas become closely related. Beauty is essential and without it, you can live life, but never truly experience it. Meursault’s character does see beauty, like the character of Marie, he just chooses to see it in a simplified and physical way. His

Yes, the idea of beauty is subjective, but it is also completely essential to life. Without beauty, you can live life, such as Meursault is doing, but you can never sincerely state that you have lived life. Without seeing the beauty in one’s personal life, humans will be utterly unable to perceive the beauty that is constantly surrounding us; Meursault is a clear example. He is completely engaged in the ideas that life is inconsequential, and therefore, is blinded to life’s experiences and the true beauty of Marie. Thus, Meursault oversimplifies the character of Marie into an ordinary, young woman who wants to be in love, get married, and travel because he is unable to see more deeply into her true beauty, or her essence. Marie is the closest that Meursault’s character has come to noticing and appreciating beauty, but it has been entirely based on the physical meaning of the word. Meursault does long for Marie but in no emotional way: he only seeks casualness. “That evening Marie came by to see me and asked me if I wanted to marry her. I said it didn’t make any difference to me and that we could if she wanted to. Then she wanted to know if I loved her” (41), Meursault is unaffected by the idea of marriage as, in his viewpoint, it doesn’t matter if he and Marie become married or remain in their current relationship of causal

Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again” (122-123). He sees a sort of beauty in the passiveness and the utterly unimportant world and hopes to truly experience the cries of hate on the day of his execution. He longs to hear something as he walks to his death, to know that he is a part of this inconsequential world: Meursault wants to confirm that his life is just as equally unimportant as that of the others who had been sentenced to death before him. He needs the same cries of hate to be shouted at him as the cries that were shouted at the others. In this moment of seeing the true beauty, Meursault also shifts in his artistic identity as he is able, no matter how different his beauty may be from our personal ideas of the word, to see the beautiful in the appreciate the need for something, for cries of hatred, and that is what the core of art is: to feel