Did this book miss the point of the Arab missing a name...

>Did this book miss the point of the Arab missing a name? I had thought the lack of a name made for the murder to seem more trivial to meursault.

I imagine that fact makes giving a name to him all the more meaningful.

I never thought about it that way. I can see where you're coming from, but judging by Kamels reasoning for writing the novel, I feel he didn't intend to make it more meaningful, but rather a more childish retort due to being upset.

It entirely missed the point of The Stranger in general. Who he shot, why he shot them, and whether he'd be convicted or executed for it or not were all trivialities. It's post-colonial fanfiction like Wide Sargasso Sea.

My eyes retracted back into my skull reading that quote.

he didn't miss the point he just took advantage (in a really obvious and retarded way) of the political climate and the fact that camus happened to make the murdered guy an arab. i feel like i'm being trolled by this thread though

Pretty sure OP is retarded, and everyone else is trolling.

That's a matter of how much credit you're willing to give him and nothing more.

Everything seemed more trivial after his mother's death. It was the starting point of his apathetic state.

Not really. He was apathetic to her death too, that was just his default state. He didn't give a fuck about anything.

so what if
Marrysalt was like
A bear instead

He was like that far before his mother's death. In fact, the prosecution uses his apathy towards putting her in a home against him by making him seem like a bozo mama hater.

Then you'd get a book and movie deal with the fuckers who put out pride and prejudice zombies.

He wasn't.
He was terribly confused and was so moved by it that he passed out when he got in the bus. He also avoided any conversation about it, he talked about something else when people were trying to empathise with him.
He's an unreliable narrator, you have to read between the lines. He was profoundly changed by his mother's death.

You're an unreliable reader.

Oh snap

In the first pages of the novel, the director of the home said that he understood why he put her there: he didn't have enough money to take care of her.
Mersault may be slightly autistic but the death of his mother was definitely an absurd event that put him into a state of existential apathy. This existential apathy fades away for a few pages, when he's with the girl at the beach, the prose becomes much more poetic when he describes the waves rolling on her body. However, it kicks back in when she asks him to marry her. It felt so out of place, so unnecessary, so "absurd" that his apathy came back.

That's not a kind thing to say. :(

I see. So I guess there isn't a way to prove his apathy prior to his mother's death. But at the same time, it'd be hard to prove he wasn't apathetic. I've slept since I've read it, but I don't think he ever says he loves his mom. That would allow us to infer that he possibly has been like that forever. However that could just be omitted to make us actually wonder if he did or not. It's very circular thinking about it.
I do agree with what you said about the feeling of absurdness fading away and then rushing back. But it never really fades away completely - you can still hear the distant lack of caring even through the poetic descriptions.

it completely explodes the novel

DUDE THE SUN LMAO

Suns out, guns out.

Kekilicious

It really does always have to be about racism or sexism nowadays, huh.
It's only a matter of time till they start revising Chrétien de Troyes and the Brothers Grimm.

What's worse is that it won awards.
"Meursault, contre-enquête won the 2015 Goncourt first novel prize, the 2014 Prix François-Mauriac and the 2014 Prix des cinq continents de la Francophonie. It was shortlisted for the 2014 Goncourt prize."

I was curious about it, so I went to Amazon to look up the first chapter. Right before I clicked on it, I thought to myself, "I bet the opening is going to be some shitty play on 'Aujourd'hui, Maman est morte.'"

Lo and behold, the first line: "Mama's still alive today."

FUCKING
DROPPED

Wow
Really makes you think

This book is the perfect example of what Bloom is always ranting about. It's the death of subtlety and honesty in readers as fundamental categories of thought, and their replacement by ideological sloganeering.

There was no racist content to Camus' book, and if there was, it was implicit in his episteme or some other familiar postmodern formulation like that. Any intelligent reader, say for example some random educated person in the 40s or 50s, would have taken taken the book's flaws with a grain of salt, intuitively and without any prompting. If you sat down and explained Said and Foucault to him or whatever, he would be able to say, oh yes, that's interesting ... but the book is still about existentialism. Hegel writing a massive treatise about the philosophy of history, and throwing in a reference or two to the backwardness of Africa because that was just common knowledge (right or wrong) at the time, doesn't compromise the entirety of Hegel's project, let alone the human feelings and insights that spawned his problematic.

There is just zero attempt anymore to fuse with a work's or author's horizon. We've raised a generation of entitled fucking morons who can't see the forest for the trees anymore. They just want to be given a ready-made packet that lets them walk up to a tree and start whining about how shitty and old-fashioned and covered in bark it is. They're fucking bacteria compared to the perspective of workaday "antiquated" racist modernists. It's actually an entire epistemic shift.

At least with Heart of Darkness, you can argue that Conrad's aesthetic choices completely intertwine with something we might find jarring as moderns. But even that is philistine presentism. Even something like Kipling, whose ethical axioms are now quaint and instantly dateable when you read them, and suggest entire eras of racism and imperialism that we intuitively see through a century of hindsight, it's STILL fucking presentism. In fact it's MORE interesting that he didn't understand the future implications of his ideas, because it shows how human thought is imperfect. The Foucauldian project was to shed ideological assumptions, to pry apart ready-to-hand categories in a new critique of knowledge, and a generation of functionary trust fund babies have turned doing the exact opposite into a sport. All they want to do is tighten the "critical" lens until all it's good for is identifying doubleplusbadthoughts.

With the modern approach, you lose the whole point of literature: to engage dialogically with the author and expand your consciousness to encompass the possibility of other lived realities. Literature is now about closing minds, limiting minds, deciding what does and doesn't fit into an eternal Present Consensus. It's the most instrumentalization of literature. Texts are now dead things you analyse with tools, so you can refine the tools, so you can better analyse the texts, forever.

I could not put it any better than this.
This is the best deconstruction of the problem with the meursault investigation. I'm glad someone was smart enough to be able to put it into words. You're doing gods' work.