The Stranger

The stranger is a story about Meursault who is an outsider as a matter of the modern world.  What we can see in this story is the phenomenon alienation which means to be separated from the social environment. The story begins with this opening sentence “MOTHER DIED TODAY”.  The word mother shows us that her son was not that close to her.  Since the beginning he does not show any kinds of emotions about his lose.  He does not give us any explanations why he behaves the way he does.  He sends his mother to a retirement house when she was alive, and never visited her because he did not want to waste his time on a Saturday and take the bus for 2 hours, just to see her.  I think he just tries to excuse himself for not being on her side in her last moments. This happens in our time as well that people sent their old parents to a retirement houses because they simply do not want to take the responsibility to take care of them.  When he went to the funeral, he keeps watching at everyone else besides himself and his mother.  He did not talk to anyone, not even to the best friend of his mother, which is a bit weird because usually someone would want to know the best friends of his mother because she was the one who knew her and was with her before she died.  What we can see during the funeral is that he keeps a physical disconnection between himself and the friends of his mother; he does not really care about them and does not ask them for any sympathy, he even thinks they are judging him. Usually, people do not have emotions when someone dies who they were not so closed to, this is happening also in this story, during all the time he mentions unimportant details, which are not related to the death of his mother. He did not have a closer relationship with her while she was alive and that cannot change after her death, he just did not feel anything.  He even wants to take a walk outside because it was such a nice weather and he gives us a long description about the country side because he does not want to think about the situation.   

Trans- Siberian Prose and Little Jeanne from France

Blaise  Cendrars  was a poet who wrote in a new style which is known as modernism.  The way he writes this poem Trans-Siberian Prose and Little Jeanne from France, is modern and it is related to our time.  He uses to tell lies in his stories like most of as do if we do not like the reality and want to make things more interesting in our lives.  Like in this poem, he tells a lot of places, and the different time frames, which are not true but yet they make the poem interesting for the reader’s eye.  I think that we as humans tend to tell lies whenever the reality does not go the way we want to. Cendrars tells lies most of the time in his poem, like for example about his age, the different places he travels to, also about the time he wrote this poem in 1913. He begging’s the poem by telling us that he was just in his adolescences which is not true, and how far was from his birth place. The author describes all this beautiful places where he pretends to be during his journey.  He describes all this little details about these places all around the world which gives an impression that he actually is really there.  And all the time he mentions what a bad poet he was, which I think makes us just believe that in fact he is a great poet. During his journey he expresses all kinds of feelings which he has like love for Jeanne,   the violence of the war, which is hard to describe how he felt is those moments in written. We do not know if Jeanne was during his journey with him nor was she just there in his imagination. He describes her as his love, she was just a child, sad and lonely, and yet she never cries, the life of a little prostitute. Compared to the other women he sees with golden dresses and great bodies, her body is unshaped, that of a child.