Was Meursault a monster?

Was Meursault a monster?

Yes

No, he was a reasonable man

Yes

He took a life for reasons other than self defense. But in his mind, he did not do it with evil intent.

Would you call him a monster?

get off his case

My brother called him a monster the other day. It made my brother feel like a stranger.

yes

Is that the best you could do? Would it kill you add some substance to your question? It's not like we're discussing literature or anything. What precisely do you mean by 'monster?' Monsters are generally represented as malicious. Meursault was not this.

France today needs Meursaults more than ever

Salamano was the best character because he perfectly represented self-destructive behavior of all forms, as well as self-deception.
A real og tsundere, too.

he was an absurd hero

>tfw you realise l'etranger is actually maman

*kicks doggo*

no more than a thunderstorm that kills someone with lightning

delet

The only thing he did wrong was sleeping out at the end, it seemed in violation of his being and contradictory to his previously passive state
or did I misunderstand?

*sperging out

How was he a monster exactly? Genuinly asking

...

He was autistic. I think they go in the "Chaotic Neutral-Neutral" band.

>tfw arab in france
laughter stops

>ywn live a comfy carefree life near the hot beaches of North Africa
>you will never not be bothered by anything other than how hot it is
>you will never accidentally get a qt sex addict gf by doing nothing
>you will never be completely content with every possible outcome of your life
>you will always be stressed
>you will always be affected inwardly by outward things
>you will never carry yourself in perfect, neutrality towards all things

>you will never be a monster

just give me the fucking gun already

a few more meursault's in the world and europe might be a better place

Camus' point was you don't want to be Meursault. You want to live a passionate and engaged life.

>understand L'Étranger wrong
>live a worthless, detached, nihilistic life

meursault is my idol desu. except i would say to the judge 'the arab tried to kill me first, i'm sorry about it but it was self-defence, also i've repented and i love jesus now, pls let me out so i can fuck my gf'

The author is dead.

The auto is dead

That's a gorgeous car. I guess if you're going to die in a car accident you might as well look good doing it.

He lived the comfiest life i can imagine

...

>tfw never been to France
I really want to do a kind of existentialist trip to somewhere in continental Europe to feel really detached from everything, where would be good? Preferably somewhere without arabs

ex-soviet shitholes

>I really want to do a kind of existentialist trip to somewhere in continental Europe to feel really detached from everything

Russia, Saint-Petersburg. Or Murmansk if you want to feel really detached.

Everyone is a monster

How do I live every day like that image?

Yeah it's beautiful, too bad about the handling.

>tfw never going to live a bohemian lifestyle

Literally just drink and smoke more and you'll make it in a few years

>I really want to do a kind of existentialist trip to somewhere in continental Europe to feel really detached from everything

>he thinks smokning and drinking lead to bohemia
i dob't even onow where the start

this greentext evoked strange feelings

Greentext user was definitely living the Veeky Forums lifestyle
Hoping he'll write a bestseller on the trip, even the greentext has some literary merit
Or then I'll write a bestseller on this greentext

Sorry I forget not everyone is a fucking retard like me so I say things that make sense to me to other people a lot. Sorry mate carry on

Donegal or Achill islands,

>lead to bohemia

of course it's not the arab, the story take place in french algeria

It's the lawyer who pushed for the death sentence on an open and shut self defense case for a clear mentally 'different' man for no reason but to do it. He was the monster

>Looking back now, the real topic of “The Stranger” is painfully obvious. Camus and the French had a demographic problem. They were going to have to give up some prime Mediterranean beachfront. Which is why the idiot protagonist kills an Arab on the beach and gets himself executed. Spoiler alert: That’s the plot of “The Stranger.” French mama’s boy kills Arab on beach, whiles away the time in prison waiting to be guillotined thinking about…you know, I can’t even remember what he was thinking about. That’s probably because, like almost all the leftist European rhetoric of the postwar years, “The Stranger” is totally disingenuous. It can’t just come out and say, “God damn it, we like this beach! We conquered this beach! Why we gotta give up all this nice beach just because you Arabs are out-breeding us?” You look back now and it’s obvious that’s what Camus, a French Algerian (a now extinct tribe), was writing about. Normal tribal behavior, resorting to violence when you’re losing coveted territory. But God forbid Camus should talk that way out loud back in those post-Stalingrad days when everything was moral, except the nonstop lying.

>Camus was a little more honest than Sartre—Titus Oates was more honest than Sartre—but not honest enough to say that the issue was demographics and beachfront. Nobody was, until Houllebecq, the first honest French writer since Celine, created “Bruno,” the kid warped forever by losing his home in Algeria. It’s a sad decline for a nation that once produced writers like La Mettrie, honest as sulfuric acid. All that courage died in Stalingrad, and in Camus’ day the only real purpose of European lit was to fill pages, make your rep, and say “Not a fascist, not a fascist” enough times that the Sovok critics in Paris believed you. And that, my friends, is how “existentialism” was born: As a way of not saying what really mattered, what was actually in everybody’s face in Europe from 1945 onward. When you can’t say what matters and you’ve got an intellectual ego the size of Jupiter, you’ve got a lot of pages to fill, and the time-tested way is a mix of over-writing and ultra-violence. Just ask our own domestic crafter of artisanal prose, Cormac (ne “Charlie”) McCarthy, about that.

>moralizing an absurdist text
hmm...

...

>Kills a sand nigger not a hero?

Oh my fucking god

existentialists btfo

Why? Maybe his mind is damaged beyond his fixing. What if he is not damaged, but the act he committed had no meaning to him, whether wrong or right? And if he did do it with evil intent or malaise, there have been millions of murderers with higher death counts and worse intentions. Surely he is no monster compared to them.

The protagonist died dumb.

>we must rid Pari from zis pest, but first, faire une cieste.

>asks if protagonist is a monster
>novel is about character assassination

underrated

>Tfw my friend said I was the type to kill someone cause it was hot

So if Merseault is man without burden, with a gentle indifference much like the world. Is Camus asserting that anything we impose on our objective reality is a lie? What about synthetic and analytic a priori? Is there such thing as time to Merseault, is there such thing as morality? If nothing matters to him, why live?

Apologies if these are pleb questions, I just read this for the first time recently and am not familar with his philosophy.

He was about to die, that's going to make you do a lot of things differently.

Clearly to fulfill impulse desires, a.k.a Hedonism.

This is really unappealing

DUDE EVERYTHING IS MEANINGLESS LMAO

Exactly. Mersault is allegorical of basic human function without Morality, priori or objectivity. He is what Camus sees as the objective human experience. Can you imagine how dissatisfied and depressed one would have to be to even write Camus' entire catalogue? To him, and other absurdists, the only appealing or understandable thing about existence are primal urges. Nothing too complex here.

Pleb here from above, what makes absurdism different from your basic nihilism then?

>Sleeping with a cape

Superman can really play out as a french philosopher

I'm a pleb too but as far as I'm concerned nihilism simply states that nothing has intrinsic value while absurdism is about acknowledging this while still putting value in things, even when that sounds contradictory.
Please correct me if I'm mistaken.

Nihilism: 1 + 1 = 2, but ultimately it does not matter because quantification is just a made up human abstraction. (Denial)

Absurdism: 1 + 1 = ??? (There are no objective truths in reality.) Can be seen as a form of acceptance.

This is the way I perceive both philosophies.

Nihilism= bad!!!
Absurdism= cool guys with cigarettes and hot girls

nihilism:
>there's no reason to push this rock up the hill when you give it the old noggin joggin desu senpai

absurdism:
>just keep pushing the rock up hill for no reason bro :)

nihilism:
>yeah, or not i guess. doesn't really matter

absurdism:
>no bro like you have to keep pushing man, you must consider yourself happy man, just push for no reason man, also be a socialist

nihilism:
>or just do whatever, right? there's no reason to do one thing or the other so you might as well do what you want

absurdism:
>wow no man, push the rock, socialism :)

nihilism:
>kys

absurdism:
>got to keep pushing brah :)