So, was Meursault autistic?

The more I post the faster this shitpiece thread dies
If your sophomoric pet theory is so intriguing try posting a single valuable insight or contextual advantage it adds to the work or the audience's understanding of it

I think so. He clearly gives a fuck about going to prison so he's not as indifferent to external circumstances as he claims to be.

He's also showing signs of having very little understanding of communication and the way other people think, on top of that his way of thinking is too strictly logical to not be autistic.

He DOES suffer from sensory overload.

yes it does you retard, sage in the option field doesn't bump the thread.

Yes.

No. I think he is just a man given to question fundamentals- the answers society provides to 'why should I be sad' are so inept because to even consider the question is so ghastly.

Meursault is thirty-ish? So say he is fifteen years in to this quasi-rejection of social norms. That is fifteen years of being met with anger and confusion at who he basically is that he has stopped bothering to react and forgotten the reasons to bother in the first place. He is inert, but not autistic, and most importantly is entirely capable of acting within society's trappings when he needs to get laid or socialise which means he is aware of them in a way that autistic people are not.

Help me understand this, I'm halfway there
What does his awakening at the end of the novel mean? He was completely docile previously to his conviction, living as though in a dream. Is it a critique on his lifestyle which led to his final circumstances, that all his choices directed himself to a death he protested despite his previous detachment?

He was doing God's work.

Honestly, it seems more likely that he was someone who understood a lot more about society than the average person rather than some sperg who just didn't understand it at all. Of course, other anons are right, it's really a representation of existentialism and not just being an autist. If he were a real person, that might be understandable, but this is a crafted character with intent, not a messy human.

No.

Mersault is a careless wreck whose final stage in the book is him finally realizing where he went wrong his whole life, being indifferent to everything he is involved with, his mothers death at the beginning his killing of the arab his own punishment for the murder and finally his sentence of death

He is a nihilistic individual with no sense of responsibility in his life and it is only until the end that he embraces his life and welcomes his death

...

How is Dorian Gray not straightforward? Is it meant to be that three versions of Wilde take?

>The more I post the faster this shitpiece thread dies
How?

>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.

>And if you’re one of these deeply, instinctively dishonest writers, you must always fog up the windshield as much as possible. So Camus’ hero kills an Arab because…”existentialism, man.” The context is carefully removed, for fear it might explode and send literary egos flying all across the sidewalk café. And the context is obvious: The long war between the North Shore of the Mediterranean and the South Shore. The Northies had it all their own way for a long time until the two huge wars where they ripped each other’s guts out; after that, the tide slowly started going the other way. Camus lived when the Northies were leaving the beaches, but the process wasn’t even close to being finished when they took the Tricolor down in Algiers and Tunis for the last time.

This review is great. Mind giving me the sauce?

the difference between an expert level buddhists's 'child-like play' and an actual child is enormous. the difference between a congenital naive autist and a deliberately acquired autism is just as large. merseault is an expert at what he's doing.

being alive is autistic

You might be an expert autist but at the end of the day ur still fucken autistic

To me Mersault is the quintessential nihilist character

The awakening at the end is akin to the sense of absurd doom we all face when we encounter the truth of our own death. Even if technology were to grant us the ability to live for millions of years, the inevitable end that we all face is damning and terrifying

Mersault throughout the whole book goes through his life seemingly without care, being mostly indifferent even to things that should shake him a bit (his mothers death) [of course who is to say what will shake some individuals and what wont]

His awakening is the spiritual rebirth we all find when we face Death head on. Its telling that Mersault is on his way to the chopping block when he realizes he wants his death- the first time in the novel he actually wants anything, looks forward to it, embraces it...

To me it seems Camus would hope that we embrace the absurdity of our Death, and that we would live our lives passionately despite Death.

One notices that Mersault doesnt make a big deal of his Death until the very end, when it is forced upon him. I dont think Mersault intentionally murdered the Arab wanting to die. To me Mersaults' nihilism prevented him from being involved in the choices he made. He never protests his own death throughout the whole novel. He remains indifferent until the very end when he realizes his death is in his face and then he welcomes it, blissfully.

His only act of passion is the embracement of his own death, truly a Stranger

I am