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Essay On Meursault's Injustice

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In Albert Camus’s The Stranger, Meursault’s apathy drives a large portion of the plotline. The man appears to have no emotions, and this only adds to the representative heuristic those around him have of a heartless killer: the idea that he was willing to smoke and drink coffee during his mother’s vigil was a more defining factor of his crime to the court, which in the book is a manifestation of society, than the fact that he accidentally shot the gun into the Arab. And given that the court finds Meursault guilty because of his failings as a member of society and because of his apathy instead of the life that he had taken, the verdict it dictates on Meursault is a definitive injustice. Meursault from the very beginning of the book has shown to be unaffected by emotion and yet he is content with his state. However, after his court hearing, where he comes upon the realization that a large part of his society hated him, Meursault despairs at his own inability to feel emotion and thereby, confronts emotion for the very first time in his life. His own personal understanding of justice has been so twisted his entire life without his quite grasping its true meaning that when he finally confronts it, he is stunned into rethinking his own beliefs. Meursault does not wish to die, and when he is sentenced to the guillotine, he …show more content…

According to Camus, life is an irrational state of being in which humans create rational concepts like ‘society’ or ‘justice’ to try and make sense of it. Meursault’s rejection of this kind of rationality both at the beginning and the end of The Stranger reflects how life will go on unaffected by whether superficial, and potentially non-existent, concepts like justice are realized and that there is nothing man can do about it other than to accept

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