The Stranger Essay

In the passage “to stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing” (pg. 56), Albert Camus suggest that there is no point to choose. To Mersault, everything is the same because there is no point to any decision he makes. Every decision that a person makes is based on how they view the situation and the outcome is labeled how the person feels about it. Mersault doesn’t feel to make a choice because the situation is nothing or has no meaning. People give it meaning.


Throughout the story of The Stranger, Mersault has been hit with choices that to him, amount to nothing. On page 41, Mersaults’s boss wanted his opinion on opening an office in Paris, an idea for the company and wondered if he would be interested in moving there. Mersault replied that living in Paris and staying where he currently was was all the same to him. On page 41, Marie, the woman he is dating, asks him to marry her, Mersault replies that it wouldn’t make any difference to him. Two completely different things are the same to him which was an indication that they mean nothing or have no important to him. Hearing that from a person might make someone think that they are depressed, but Mersault wasn’t even unhappy about his response. It meant nothing to him.


The question that many people ask about the character of Mersault is why he is the way he is. That question is the theme of the story and the belief that the author had when he wrote the book. Albert Camus, who was an Existentialist, made his character, Mersault, the personification of the belief. Existentialism is the belief that life has no meaning only the meaning you give it. You must develop yourself into making one. A paradox in the form of ideas, which can not be proven unless the one, who comes up with the idea, takes a drastic “leap of faith”. This leap will define your meaning only to you as your ideas are absurd in the eyes of a common person.


Maybe the reader is not suppose to understand Mersault because we don’t share his belief or truly understand what existentialism is. Maybe the reader is supposed to view him as “absurd” and confusing because existentialism isn’t what we follow.