Quote (Skinned @ Nov 14 2020 08:01am)
The Stranger is such a strange book, such a quick read. Such a strange lesson in the end with the execution of the stranger. It is very much like The Trial by Kafka in how absurd it is. He is never executed or punished for killing an arab, and that was such a secondary concern from the warden of the jail. He was so concerned about his lack of grief for his mother then decided to execute him after the stranger rejected Christianity to him and ultimately he was executed for being different and not caring about anything at all, going along with the engagement because it didn't matter...
The scene where he shoots the guy on the beach...its like I'm standing here, this guy is yelling at me, and the sun is so fucking hot right now, the sweat is in my eyes, I can barely see and am uncomfortable.......and since nothing really matters anyway I might as well shoot this arab.
The lack of personhood to French justice was such an indictment on colonialism in Algeria. Camus wrote about never really being Algerian and never really being French either and how weird that is.
One of the funnier parts of The Plague is the in the first three chapters he doesn't really introduce the characters and describes places and people in Oran instead. The one man who would constantly feed cats from the balcony, so they would gather and he could just spit on them. The guy who was frantically looking for the mangy dog he always beat on and musing if the dog finally left the abusive relationship, why the abuser was so worried about the wellbeing of a creature he was harming constantly, etc.
I think of these as companion novels for philosophical works The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel, dealing with suicide and whether we should kill ourselves or have a cup of coffee as the ultimate philosophical question (everything follows from there lol), and authentic living.
I honestly love this dude and wish he got to age more and put out more work.
All the Nietzscheans left their imprint on me for sure....Camus, Freud, Sartre, Foucault...
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