The Awakening: A Character Analysis

“she could not tell anyone why she was crying”, and Meursault has barely any emotions what’s so ever, both the extremes lead to one discovery: emotion is an obstacle for both characters. Edna can be described to have the personality of an emotional monster and Meursault can be described to have the personality of a detached observer, but in the long run, both their traits, though polar opposites, prove that the characters share a deeper similarity rather than just the ability to cry over an unhappy marriage or the passing of a loved one.

In addition, the degree of impulsiveness shown by each character is significantly high. Edna moves out of her house while her husband is away and doesn’t even think of what she will tell him. She is also impulsive

Meursault stops being a passive observer. In fact, he's "sure about [himself], about everything, surer than [the chaplain] could ever be, sure of [his] life and sure of the death [he has] waiting for [him]” (Camus 131). He went from not caring about anything that happened to him, to understanding and accepting the consequences of his actions and having an opinion on his death sentence; “Man cannot escape death” (Camus 141). He also states that he knows that he has left his life in the hands of others for too long. Edna also shares this problem with Meursault. “One of these days I’m going to put myself together for a while and determine what character of a woman I am…I don’t know” (Chopin 138). She was trying to live and to please her Creole surroundings, forgetting about herself and how she wants to live her life. People even said “she’s not one of us; she’s not like us” (Chopin 35). Unfortunately, Meursault realizes his flaws at the end of his life when it’s too late, unlike Edna who decides to move away from her home and kids and start a life on her own with a lover as an artist. She hopes around from Robert to Arobin, mainly to satisfy her desires. Even though Edna’s “awakening” leads her to commit suicide, she still has one. Edna leaves the unpleasant style of creole life, and Meursault refuses to submit to the lawyer’s orders when

Edna and Meursault both died at the end of the stories. Though Edna committed suicide, a tragic and rather surprising conclusion to the book, it can still be seen as triumphant in a way that she has escaped a life style that she so hardly hated. It’s definitely weird to say, but Edna’s death, the way Edna sees it, was the only solution to her problem. By Edna solving her internal problem, the story comes to an end as does Edna’s life. Edna’s role in the story circles in a wheel like motion. She starts out upset about how her life is living itself and her feeling like a tool only there to fulfill the role of a woman. Next, she gains the strength and power to leave the life she did not believe she was predestined to live, but then she ends up right back where she started, upset and unwilling to continue the way she is. This circle of happenings leaves her floating somewhere out in the ocean, finally at rest. In the same way, Meursault’s life also follows this same circular path, but rather than the sad-happy-sad path that Edna followed, Meursault turned around on a happy-sad-happy wheel. He starts out happy with how his life has been going. We know this because when his boss asked him to leave and start a new life, he responded “people never change their lives, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn’t dissatisfied with” (Camus 52). But, in the turn