Book: The Outsider written by Albert Camus, originally published in French as L’Etranger in 1942 translated by Joseph Laredo in 1982.
Reflective statement
Initially, I lacked general interest in Albert Camus’s The Outsider. I did not find anything particularly inventive or new. The interactive oral allowed me to explore aspects of the book in detail which admittedly made it seem impressingly alluring. The cultural and contextual characteristics were not as bland as they had originally appeared to me.
I had been pleasantly surprised with each new discovery the class had to offer. The first of which was that The Outsider was based during the 1940s in Algeria and had been published in 1942. At such a time Algeria had been both governed and colonised by France. The book mirrors the context in which it was written, by exhibiting a colonial attitude throughout the text. For example during Meursault’s trial Raymond and Marie were disregarded as they lacked the vocabulary to express themselves formally due to their lower social status background.
With this new outlook on the author and the book, I thought it
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The reader is aware of the fact that Meursault is either contemplating life or already has due to his obvious absence of emotion :“I probably did love mother, but that didn’t mean anything”.
His unconventional way of thinking causes Meursault to seem confusing to those around him Meursault’s absurdism becomes increasingly more apparent towards the end of the book as there are several characters questioning his motives for shooting the Arabian man after he had already been killed :“ But everybody knows life isn’t worth living. Deep down I knew perfectly well that it doesn’t matter much whether you die at thirty or at seventy.”, upon hearing this people are shocked, it is not exactly