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While he was going up to the coffin I told him not to trouble.

"Eh? What's that?" he exclaimed. "You don't want me to? . . . "

He put the screwdriver back in his pocket and stared at me. I realized then that I shouldn't have said "No," and it made me feel rather embarrassed (Camus 6).

Camus is foreshadowing Meursault's eventual downfall. The character cannot feign emotions that he does not have, and, though his responses are authentic, they are frequently contrary to societal convention. He is, above all other characters in the book, fearlessly, brutally honest with himself. At the risk of offending people and, eventually, at the risk of his life, he is unwilling to bend to others' expectations of him.

What others in the novel expect from him is an assent to the established social order. The world is a place in which mothers are mourned with copious and highly public tears, where romantic love is an absolute prerequisite to a happy marriage, where one's friends are of the highest class, and where remorse for ignoring these assumptions is mandatory. Meursault, through his disinterest in such expectations, has made himself a perfect scapegoat. His response to the world, while eminently reasonable,

. . .
rates the crux of the absurdist problem. The murder is both inexplicable and reasonable. This ambiguity leads to difficulties in critical approach. Can the reader empathize with a murderer? Can the reader condemn someone who has acted so reasonably? These questions give the novel its power: "It is the enigma of the crime--why it took place, why the protagonist tended inexorably toward this catastrophe--that resides at the very center of the novel (Ellison 52). Part II of the narrative gives the reader a decidedly different Meursault. As the character states right before he pulls the trigger, "And so, with that crisp, whipcrack sound, it all began" (Camus 76). The disinterest, the fomenting anger, the bewilderment at society that has lain dormant throughout the bulk of the book are finally given their voice in the second half. He has made decisions and expressed opinions that have not been expressly challenged within the narrative. The second half of the book places Meursault in an entirely different world. Those actions that he took earlier in the novel, that were once viewed as mere eccentricity are now viewed as fatal pride. The reader may think nothing of the fact that Meursault smoked a cigarette at his mother's funeral. Pla
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Marie Meursault's, Society Camus, Eh What's, , Literature Symposium, Albert Camus, albert camus, L'Etranger Il, Philadelphia Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas Tech, half book, meursault priest, committed crime, camus portrays,
Approximate Word count = 1709
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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