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.