A lack of beliefs

I believe that "The Stranger" is a very fitting title to describe Meursalt's character. I originally thought that there would be some odd character the Meursalt meets and changes his life, but as you get through the book, it becomes very apparent that Meursalt himself is the Stranger. Meursalt is odd in that he shares a view of the world that is not very common and very scary to the way of life that most people experience in the book. Meursalt believes that nothing really matters. Nothing matters because everyone is going to die in the end, nothing matters because even though his mother died, nothing changed for him. He does not believe in God, has no ambition, and just kind of goes along with the things that come to him.

These are the types of things that scare the French people who will indict and accuse him, not so much because of his actions, but more so because of how he doesn't believe in anything and doesn't have any visible feelings. Meursalt is strange to them, and their fear of their ideas being challenged is what I think results in his sentence. It is natural to be scared of something that you can't understand, and the French people let this cloud their judgements of Meursalt. Of course, Meursalt is guilty, but because they can' find a motive for his crime, they do not know how to judge him and have to instead judge his character. This is when Meursalt almost feels again. He realizes pretty quickly how absurd it is that the court is judging who he is, but also how he can't do anything about it and is going to be found guilty for being some sort of monster.

Meursalt's lack of feelings make him a hard character to get into the mind of. As readers we still aren't fully able to comprehend what goes on in his mind, even though we get a first person narrative from him. This makes it really hard to judge who Meursalt is. At first, it doesn't appear that anything is too wrong with him, he just lacks a little empathy and is a little apathetic about everything. Nothing too extreme until we get further into the book, where we realize that there is definitely something going on inside that not even the readers are allowed to know. At the end of the book he becomes a full on nihilist, and he realizes that all there is for anyone to do is just wait for death. And he wants a lot of people to see his death so that he can show to them that none of their lives mean anything and everyone will die.

Even though I liked Meursalt at first and didn't have any problem with his character, I felt more and more uncomfortable with who his character was as the story progressed. His crime without any motive is extremely unsettling - it would help me to understand him better if he just had a feeling that he wanted to shoot the Arab. But we get nothing from that and it becomes very clear that Meursalt has some sort of problem with the world that causes him to throw away any beliefs, motivation, and empathy that we would expect from a normal person.

A buggy dude

Entering The Metamorphosis, I was not sure what to think. It is a book that seems like it should be a dream. Gregor suddenly wakes up as a bug one morning after waking up late. The weird thing about this situation is more that Gregor doesn't care so much that he has turned into a bug, but more that he is going to be late for work. If I was in that position, work would be the absolute last thing on my mind. I'd be thinking more along the lines of "What the hell?" or "Who can I scare now?" not "The next train left at  seven o'clock, and in order to catch it he would have to rush around like mad," (8). He is so focused on work that he barely considers how his change will impact other people. The only thing he thinks about is work. His mother describes him as kind of pathetic because he spends his free time studying time tables for trains so that he is never late for work. Work consumes his entire life, thoughts and all. The only sense of individualism one can get from him is the framed picture of a woman from a magazine. He made the frame and picked the picture, but there isn't much else for the reader to know about him, because he is all work.

In some ways, he was already a bug before the transformation. Consider the ant. Ants have one purpose: to do work that will benefit the colony. That is what Gregor does. He works so that he can pay off his father's debts and so that his family will not be out on the streets. An ant has no sense of individualism. An ant is just one part of the colony that must do what it can for the queen. Maybe becoming a bug is one way for him to develop a sense of individuality. He will have a story to tell. Something to differentiate himself from others. Or maybe he acted so much like a lowly working ant that he actually became one. There is a part of quantum mechanics in which people's perception of reality may be able to actually shape reality itself. I do not know how true this is (I doubt it myself, but it is an interesting idea), but maybe other people saw Gregor so much as a non-individual that only worked that he actually became a bug.

Gregor is in a weird spot with his job. He states "If I were not holding back because of my parents, I would have quit long ago. It is clear that he does not enjoy his job. This is made even more clear by the head clerk saying that his performance has been inadequate lately. But Gregor can't leave. He has to take care of his parents. But why can't he just get another job? It appears as though Gregor's parents owe some debt to his boss specifically, and that probably has resulted in Gregor being trapped in his travelling salesman job. I kind of feel bad for Gregor, being in the situation that he is in, but I find it hard to imagine him any other way. If Gregor's parents weren't in debt, would he be more likely to go out and do things in his free time. From what I know, I think he would be much the same. He would probably find something that he could stick to and become completely preoccupied with it. Gregor's buggyness would probabbly follow him no matter the type of life he had.