A Letter to Mersault

This letter comes to you with utmost urgency, as you await execution for your murder conviction. Your lost habit of self-analysis has made you a stranger to yourself and alienated from others. Your dearly beloved Maman has died, yet your reaction to her death shows you have become detached from human emotion and feeling. As you said, "I probably did love Maman, but that didn't mean anything. At one time or another all normal people have wished their loved ones were dead" (Camus 65). You have killed a complete "stranger," without provocation, which shows you have become lost to yourself and to God. Before your execution I appeal to you to renounce your existential feelings and embrace God's forgiveness and redemption.

You have become removed from human feeling in your personal and social life, which makes you believe there is no meaning in human existence. You cannot even concern yourself with the news of your mother's death, "Maman died today. Or yesterday, maybe, I don't know" (Camus 3). You remain indifferent to this event that has a powerful emotional impact on most human beings, primarily because you lack love and genuine human contact in your life. This makes you believe there is no purpose or meaning to existence and that we live in a godless world.

One of the reasons you most think we live in a godless world is because your friends have also strayed from God. The "warehouse guard" Raymond is much more capa

Related Essays

Plato and King: Crito and A Letter from Birmingham Jail Considering they were written thousands of years apart, it is uncanny how similar Plato's Crito and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" are .... (1035 4 )

The Scarlet Letter The subject of this essay is Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and the conflict between the individual and society. It would .... (1560 6 )

The Scarlet Letter The number three in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter is highly significant in reinforcing the author's main theme of redemption. Redemption .... (513 2 )

Rhetorical analysis of a Letter The artifact for rhetorical analysis is a letter to the editor written by one Roy Mescovado on the subject of money spent by the public on colleges and .... (1488 6 )

The Scarlet Letter The following research is on the subject of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. This novel was published over 150 years ago in a very different age. .... (2284 9 )

Scarlet Letter In The Scarlet Letter, we see that Hester Prynne is persecuted by a Massachusetts society whose leaders believed that religious authority overrides civil .... (2348 9 )

Category: Literature - A