The Stranger is a unique book without the usual protagonist that we all root for. Meursault is far from your normal hero in novels. He's consistently detached from emotions and society and is only focused on his physical surroundings: making him hard to relate to. He's emotionenless during his mother's funeral-aside from the minor inconvenience of the sweltering heat as he walks. To me, the beginning of the novel seemed sort of useless, other than us figuring out that Meursault is emotionless and isolated from his environment, I feel like there's just a lot of Meursault smoking, napping, and drinking coffee.
At the end of part one, however, things really take a turn when he makes he decision to shoot the Arab- or maybe he didn't really make the decision. I'm not sure if I'm right in saying it was just an impulse, but Meursault just does it with no thoughts influencing his actions. This is where The Stranger is different again. Normally we know the motive behind a villians' decisions in the classic narrative, but here it's just a baseless action. Do we hate Meursault because he killed someone? Normally that would be a resounding yes, but right now I'm not sure how I feel about him. He's a weird person with weird thoughts. He himself admits that he can be emotionless at times, and he's someone who enjoys his talks with the magistrate and almost thanks the reporters that write about his crime. Here we go with the character complexity again.
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