Monsieur Meursault, in The Stranger by Albert Camus, is faced with his mother's death at the beginning of the novel. In fact, on the very first page, the speaker tells the reader his mother is dead. For most people, this would seem like a large challenge to overcome. A challenge filled with grief, mourning, and loss. However, as Meursault buries his mother and other people attend her funeral, he is not distraught over her death. He quickly moves on from her death, making it seem as if there was nothing he needed to deal with emotionally. As Meursault journeys through the rest of the novel, he encounters many different challenges one would think would take awhile to overcome. But Meursault does not take an extended period of time to look adversity in the eye, but instead moves on to the next thing, as if it were no big deal. At the conclusion of the novel, Meursault sits in his prison cell, waiting for his execution date. He does not know exactly when it will come, but he knows the end is near, and he accepts his fate.
As the course of the year goes on, and I continue to read and discuss our class novels, I have come to recognize when a character is faced with adversity, and eventually how they overcome this challenge. I then proceed to write about it on this blog. But while I was reading The Stranger, I found it was harder to comprehend how Meursault dealt with all of the different challenges he was faced with. He seemed at first insensitive, indifferent, or complacent to the different situations, and I found it hard to relate to the emotional side of his character. When Meursault chooses to accept his circumstances at the end, I finally understood how he was choosing to face the adversity. Meursault wasn't trying to change the different challenges he was handed, but instead accepted them and moved on. He didn't dwell on one certain problem, but realized there would be many problems to come, and he didn't want to live his life worrying. Some might say he didn't have the capability to feel emotion toward hard things life handed him, but I would argue he overcame each challenge in the only way he knew how. It might have been unconventional compared to some of the other protagonists I have come across this year. However, I enjoyed reading Meursault's journey, and watching him deal with life's challenges.
