The Stranger Research Paper

In The Stranger, Camus’ treatment of nature demonstrates how he sees nature as unrelated to and uninterested in human activity. In the text of The Stranger, Mersault tells the reader, a woman at his mother’s funeral reported “If you go too slowly there's the risk of a heatstroke. But, if you go too fast, you perspire, and the cold air in the church gives you a chill." I saw her point; either way one was in for it.” (Camus 16) This statement comes early in the text and is part of setting up the action. In it, Camus shows the reader how nature goes on unrelated to human activity by implying Mother Nature simply is what she is. Human beings have their ways and, due to the choices we make based on our environment, we may have good or bad outcomes, but those choices are still our own and nature cannot be measured by those outcomes. Meursault’s decision to walk slow and get heatstroke or fast and perspire is merely his decision to interact with nature one way or another. No matter what he does or how he refers to nature, the sun and its heat is just being what it is.
As the story moves along Meursault describes how he is actively pushing back, hard against nature and yet nature is still unchanged. “The sun and its intense light “pressed itself on me, trying to check my progress. And each time I felt a hot blast strike my
forehead, I gritted my teeth, I clenched my fists in my trouser pockets and keyed up every nerve to fend off the sun and the dark befuddlement it was pouring into me. Whenever a blade of vivid light shot upward from a bit of shell or broken glass lying on the sand, my jaws set hard. I wasn't going to be beaten, and I walked steadily on. (Camus 49) He is actively and vigorously fighting against a foe which doesn’t even acknowledge his presence, let alone the fight. At the point where Meursault shoots the Arab on the beach, he has described the sun’s light and heat as pushing him so unrelentingly. Yet Meursault’s actions have made no impact on the sun, it’s light or its heat.
Camus recognized “human beings inevitably seek to understand life's purpose, Camus takes the skeptical position that the natural world, the universe, and the human enterprise remain silent about any such purpose.” (Aronson) Camus, like many writers of his generation, having experienced some tragedy in his childhood as a result of World War I, developed in existentialist view of the world. To Camus’s generation the war had given little reason to be hopeful (Golomb 123)
Although Camus was too young to experience the War’s ugliness for himself, he lost his father to WWI, which made his youth significantly more difficult.
He spent his childhood living in a small three-bedroom apartment, with no electricity or running water, in a working class suburb of Algiers. The apartment had no electricity or running water and was ruled by the authoritarian hand of his maternal grandmother, a woman who was severe, sporadically even brutal, and disposed to melodramatics. The family living under her roof in the small apartment was her daughter Catherine and two sons Joseph and Etienne as well as Catherine's sons, Lucien and
Albert.
The beginning of Camus’ philosophical writings are “lyrical essays and sketches describe a consciousness reveling in the world, a body delighting in nature, and the individual's immersion in sheer physicality. Yet these experiences are presented as the solution to a philosophical problem, namely finding the meaning of life in the face of death.” (Aronson)
By the end of “The Stranger”, Meursault has come to realize fighting so hard against nature has gotten him nowhere. When the chaplain asks him whether or not he had wished for an afterlife he replies, “Everybody has that wish at times. But that had no more importance than wishing to be rich, or to swim very fast, or to have a better shaped mouth.” (Camus 98) The implication here is that it’s all the same. Whether one wishes for an afterlife or doesn’t, it is part of nature and will be there or not be there unrelated to human wishes for it.