Albert Camus' the Stranger
Albert Camus' "The Stranger" (L'Etranger) is a story of how the protagonist Meursault is eventually condemned to die because he would not conform to what society expected of him. Meursault throughout the novel remains is own person: he reacts to situations exactly the way he wants to. His reactions are uncompromising even in the face of opposition and danger. Society expects us to behave within the bounds of specific norms. Society, especially in Meursault's case) left no room for individualism. Camus' novel is a testament to individuality as opposed to working for the greater good of society. Meursault is condemned because he is a non-conformist.

Meursault's character is one which does not worry about expressing emotion. Eventually society uses this part of his character against him. Meursault, confronted with the death of his mother does not react by being outwardly distraught. He does feel sadness, but he continues…...

It's the main reason why Camus doesn't make an accent on tragedy of any particular death.
A very ironic correlation of life and plague is made by one of Rieux patients for whom plague and life have nearly the same meaning. Plague epidemic is a very talented mystification made by Camus in order to make analogies with real life, where illnesses, suffering and death contribute to the fate of every individual and are integrated into our life. In both cases person loses humanism which plays a fundamental role in resisting cruelty and indifference. Plague and death can not be either cured by physicians or cognized and explained by Catholic priests. Nobody can give explanation to the reasons of plague as it is as absurd as existence of Oran's townsmen at the very beginning of the novel. The death of the innocent child only deepens the dilemma as neither father Paneloux…...

(71) In Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, Camus makes clear that man wants to live; in supporting death, not only do Christians run against their core Christianity, they also undermine the power of Christian life. Camus beleves that there will be no lasting piece in either the heart of man nor their greater society until death is formally outlawed; because the survival of life and the dearth of death are at the heart of Christianity, he finds that Christians are most demanded to support the life of those in the world. By supporting the death penalty at all, history provides ample evidence for Christian leaders who refused their Christianity by refusing life to other men. Nevertheless; he had one parallel in common with the Christian church: an understanding of temptation. During the Vichy Purge, Camus wondered for the first time if the death penalty were, perhaps, a viable punishment for…...

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"But it is true that I, and a few others, know what must be done, if not to reduce evil, at least not to add to it. Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children." (73)

Despite his political predilections that spawned disagreement with many specific groups, from the Rosenbergs to Arabs later on, he worked endlessly to save them from the death penalty that he thought, while perhaps a tempting punishment, was an ultimate punishment for the men making and carrying out the orders.

Camus worked tirelessly to end what he called Absurd Death, nominally any death that meaningless was committed in the name of politics. Throughout The Unbeliever and the Christians, Camus reformulates his interpretation of meaningful life and death, limned by the conversation of the history and relevance of Christianity. When he received the Nobel Prize in 1957, he publicly thanked the committee and world for his recognition as a novelist, but stressed the importance of life and its recognition as a political cause. Throughout his writings, both fictional and non, and personal life, Camus was at home in the major trials of history, but at peace in the human celebration of life. Despite the terrors committed throughout history, he resigned from the temptation to respond to evil with evil, and urged Christians to take up their cross and respond to death with the life he secularly preached and they religiously acclaimed.

Albert Camus' influential novel, the Stranger, a great work of existentialism, examines the absurdity of life and indifference of the world. This paper provides a summary of the novel, and outlines some of the novel's main themes.
The novel's protagoinist, Meursault, is a distanced and indifferent young man. He does not believe in God, and lives his life with seemingly sensuous abandon. After Meursault is caught up in the life of a local pimp, he rather inexplicably murders a young man on the beach, and is put on trial. In a ridiculous and seemingly arbitrary trial, he is essentially tried and found guilty for failing to adhere to society's beliefs and morals. It is during this trial that Meursault comes to terms with the absurdity of life.

The Stranger begins with the news that Meursault's mother has died. rites Camus, "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know. I had a…...

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Works Cited

Camus, Albert. The Stranger. London: Penguin Books, 1982.

Plague by Albert Camus
Applications in 21st Century

The thoughtful writings of past are often written so thoroughly that they are applicable even today. One such writing The Plague was written to narrate the fictional plague incidence that is painted to have taken place in 1940. The event was a panic for the people in the story. Albert Camus, the author suggests that human sufferings are often too horrible that the survival of the community is at stake. The labor class is normally the one most affected by the epidemics, disasters and other tragedies. The novel can be discussed and applied to the today's world in five parts. The five parts of the novel have different applications for today.

Thesis Statement

The paper investigates main elements of the novel The Plague by Albert Camus to relate it to the 21st century's plague of racism and to find out how this plague can be fought.

Part…...

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References

Albert Camus: The Plague and an Ethic of Nonviolence, (1998), Retrieved from:

 http://legacy.earlham.edu/~tonyb/bing_charles1.html

In fact, the only time he shows anger in the story is near the end, when a chaplain visits him in his cell and he loses his patience with his preaching and questions. He is sentenced to die, and the only thing he hopes for is a big crowd at his execution, because that will give his life some closure and meaning. It is a sad commentary about an equally sad and empty life.
In conclusion, "The Stranger's" theme is both unsettling and completely clear by the end of the novel. Camus feels life is totally meaningless, a bleak assessment for most readers, and he illustrates this meaningless existence with Meursault, who is completely devoid of sympathy and feeling for anyone but himself. It is difficult to mourn him by the end of the novel because Camus has painted such a vivid picture of a man without a soul. He…...

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References

Camus, Albert. The Stranger. New York: Vintage Books, 1946.

We accept these injustices because in theory the poor and the suffering can better themselves through hard work, due to the nature of the capitalist system. We try to rectify these injustices to some degree through social support safety nets: yet for many individuals, there is too much to overcome, too many obstacles placed in their way even before they are born.
On a macro level, the developing world often profits off of the developed world: the developed world uses products made in sweatshops, casually spends dollars at the mall, when those same pennies could buy a starving child food. This raises the question: if Omelas was destroyed, and the child was saved, would a civilization such as our own arise in its place, with many other starving children? As much as the utilitarian questions it provokes, "The ones who walk away from Omelas," also says a great deal about…...

Certainly this is a key theme in books by diverse authors (Malamud, Tan, etc.). It is the very institutionalization of race that causes it to continue and perpetuate when, quite easily we see that figures such as James Baldwin and others, working in the 1920s and 1930s in Harlem, could begin the long road to overcoming White supremacy.
What does the "impact of modernity" mean to traditional cultures of the Afro-Asian-Indian world? What was the general reaction of the native populations? Why was the West so successful imposing its will on these areas of the world? Do we see examples of this in contemporary times? Construct a 250-300-word post answering these questions.

Time and time again we note that traditional cultures that are forced to interact with European-based systems often lose what one might call their "humanity." This paradigm began whenever European decided to move into an area and uspurp authority,…...

Stranger by Albert Camus
The main character, Meursault, mother dies in the book, and he travels to her funeral. As he sit by the coffin, he displayed virtually no emotion or offers any indication of grief. The next day, he meets an old coworker has is named Marie. They go out on a date to a diner and then a movie and shortly after a relationship forms. Later these two individuals take the relationship to the next stage and announce their engagement. Meursault's neighbor, Raymond, who is a notorious pimp and portrayed as immoral man, asks for help to lure his mistress back as well as to help him get acquitted at the police station on charges of beating her up. Meursault indifferently agrees to help Raymond as a neighborly thing to do.

As the plot develops, the author starts to portray Meursault's escalating indifference to life. Meursault then kills an Arab…...

Plague: Albert Camus
Camu's Philosophy

Albert Camus' philosophy is often defined as the "philosophy of the absurd" the idea that life has no rational or real meaning (Ward, 2005). This philosophy is defined through the actions and life of his six characters in his novel The Plague. It is here that Camus attempt o imply that while there is no rational basis for moral order that does not suggest that one should have an indifferent attitude toward moral order. Camus instead presents himself as someone who is optimistic of the future even though he may lack hope. He defines the "absurd hero" as someone who resists the illusion that rational order exists but also resists despair (Ward, 2005).

His philosophy is similar to Existentialism, who tend to assert no rational or moral meaning can be tied to human existence. Unlike existentialist thought however Camus suggests that all humans have an innate capacity…...

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References:

Bronner, Stephen Eric. Camus: Portrait of a Moralist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Ward, Selena. SparkNote on The Plague. 21 Oct. 2005

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Camus's novel revolves around the idea of love- love for the humanity. Tarrou was a person who had felt that kind of love at a very young age when he went to a court to see his father, an attorney, in action. He recalls: 'the only picture I carried away with me of that day's proceedings was a picture of the criminal. I have little doubt he was guilty -- of what crime is no great matter. That little man of about thirty, with sparse, sandy hair, seemed so eager to confess everything, so genuinely horrified at what he'd done and what was going to be done with him... I needn't go on, need I? You've understood -- he was a living human being" (Camus, 224).
That was important for him. It was important to see himself and others as human beings even if they had been accused of a…...

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Works Cited

Bree, Germaine. Albert Camus. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964.

Bree, Germaine. Camus. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1959.

Camus, Albert. The Plague. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Alfred a. Knopf, 1971.

Doubrovsky, Serge. "The Ethics of Camus." Trans. Sandra Mueller and Jean-Marc Vary. Preuves. 116. 39-49.

The implications of this concept are enormous and profound. Just as Kierkegaard reverses the Hegelian construct of the universal being over the individual, the inner is placed by Kierkegaard in a position of supremacy over the outer. It has already been shown that faith can make acts moral to the individual performing them even when universal ethics would condemn the same act. Universal ethics are an element of the outer, or that which can be expressed and communicated publicly, whereas faith is inherently incommunicable and therefore individual and inner. Because inner faith can reject outer ethics, the inner gains a place of supremacy over the outer, and the particular experience must be seen as the main constituent of reality. An individual determines their own relationship to the universal based on their relationship to the inward looking absolute.

In the Stranger, Mersault at first find only the rejection of the universal, without…...

This story also made me sad, because the schoolteacher was really a good man. It also said a lot about the culture of the area, and how the whites and the Arabs get along. There are times when the schoolteacher fears the Arab, and does not like him, but he still sees him as a human, with feelings and needs. That is more than many people see when two cultures clash, and it seems like the schoolteacher was trying to be as fair as he possibly could. It made me think about what I would do in a similar situation. I would hope that I would be as fair as the schoolteacher, but that the entire situation would turn out better. It also made me think about all the stories we have read so far. They are all very different, and yet they all have common threads that tie them…...

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References

The Bedford Anthology of World Literature: The Twentieth Century, 1900-the Present. New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2003.

At the same time, Daru did not openly encourage the Arab to escape. Adherence to societal rules must be dependent on the justness of those rules and in light of the crime the Arab had been accused of, Daru likely felt some obligation to law and order.
Daru lives literally between the confines of the rigid colonial social order and the vast wilderness of the Algerian desert. His geographical position parallels his internal conflict between his obligations as a French man and his obligations as a human being. When Daru notes that "to hand him over was contrary to honor," he avers his belief in individual freedoms. On the other hand, the Arab's "stupid crime revolted him," because murder represented a breakdown of the fundamental bond of trust between human beings. Therefore, societal rules are irrelevant when they stem from prejudice and oppression but valid when they reflect the overarching…...

Throughout his play, collective devastation is met with personal suffering. It is only when this becomes a shared suffering that it can become a collective way to redemption. The divides of a war now over would give way to this shared experience for all peoples of France, charged with the responsibility of rebuilding.
Indeed, this speaks much to the futility of war itself, as spoke by Camus when he resolves that "all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories" (Camus, 262). The viewpoint expressed here is in informed by the severity of orld ar II and the unprecedented global experience of attempting to be removed from this trauma. In the resolution instigative of this discussion, we can see that Camus holds on to some sense that man is inherently more a good creature than a bad one, and that he is to…...

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Works Cited

Camus, Albert. The Plague. 1947. NY: McGraw Hill, 1965.

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