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.