Resumo de Summary Of The Outsider By Albert Camus

How should we live? Meursault, worker in a standard Algerian office, has chosen to position himself as a spectator of everyday life. He observes the world around him and other people, on one occasion tearless at his mother?s burial, having put her in a home. But it was so hot that his physical discomfort was more pressing than his grief. Then he returns to observing the town, in his habitual Sunday boredom. It is a sort of continual interest in minutiae, as though to populate the void of his life. Above all, he changes nothing and refuses ambition in the form of a promotion to Paris. He never commits. After all, is his mistress Marie anything more than a means to sexual gratification? He could have lied, telling her he loved her? But it is she who wants to marry him. He never engages his moral sense. He could have intervened to prevent the daily beatings of Salamo?s dog, replacement for his wife as domestic scapegoat. He never asks questions. He never judges anyone. He ignores what others may think: why not go to the cinema with Marie the day after his mother?s burial? Are we compelled to think that Meursault considers his kind as inherently imperfect, himself included? He does not talk about it. As for other people, he simply listens to them, perhaps even understands them. Simply because he likes him, he offers his help to another neighbour, Raymond Sintès, a pimp who beats up his mistress. He remains neutral? The time comes when society will reject this foreign body, this outsider ? the novel?s very title. Caught up in this spiral of non-participation, he becomes a murderer by chance, on that fateful beach where he kills an Arab, the woman?s brother, shortly after he attacks Raymond. But the heat was so great in that merciless brightness, reflected by the threatening knife, that he simply pulled the trigger, blinded by sweat trickling from his brow. The prosecutor will later denounce his crime not as the work of a racist, but of a sheer villain, and, in support of this, catalogues every indication of his insensitivity ? above all as a son ? and his lack of repentance. As the months of the trial pass, a montrous psychological portrait of Meursault is painted by the prosecution, because, as far as social norms are concerned, he does not love his mother and he does not believe in God. During this time, he discovers the world of the prison by ignoring the fact that it deprives him of his freedom. In addition to cigarettes, and women, from whose absence he suffers cruelly at the beginning. But you get used to everything eventually? He flees boredom through a game of enumeration: listing the entirety of his possessions through memory. Through sleep, he has found a way of escaping reality. He has found a way to derive entertainment from endlessly re-reading the text on a scrap of newspaper. He has learned to talk to himself. Following the trial and having been condemned to death, perhaps more for having put his mother in a home than for the crime that justice deemed premeditated, Meursault knows the price he has to pay. He who has always given free rein to his physical needs more than his feelings inconsciously reverses his own logic. And there we witness his fear of death, like that of an animal being hounded, his fantasized escape plans, and finally his anger and insults directed at the overly certain chaplain who urges him to submit to God?But the condemned man regains peace when confronted with the world?s over-riding indifference?

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