Md. Zahid Hossain

We, modern people, tend to compartmentalize ourselves with our identity, jobs, and ethnicity and we pretend to show something that does not exist in our hearts. It seems that everything revolves around our dependency on socializing like emotions, daily actions, communication, and any events of life as if we are experiencing Sisyphus’ punishment. His never-ending punishment was to spend eternity wrestling a giant boulder up a steep hill. If he was able to crest the top of the hill, his punishment would be over. But each time, he was about to be put at the top, ending his labour. He would need to climb back down, get behind the boulder, and repeat the struggle of pointless and eternal labour. Similarly, modern people hanker after success, they wake up, manage morning to evening jobs, scroll social media, post their actions, and lead a life regular basis. What today we are exploring has a certain connection to the above-mentioned life process. We pretend to be religious but deep down we are atheists, and we are disrespectful to the order of god.

“The Stranger” is a literary masterpiece of the 20th century, written in the French language in 1941 by Albert Camus, A French philosopher, and author. The story deals with the philosophy of absurdism, and nihilism. The narrator’s approach and view raise the question of the individual’s existence in the earth. According to the protagonist, Meursault, the universe is pointless as he is completely unfazed when his mother dies.

This novel appears to be slightly unusual in comparison with the pattern of other novels. Meursault treads the path usually avoided by the rest of society. The story begins with his indifference to his mother’s death, he has no emotion rather he rejects the funeral director’s offer to open the coffin to glance mother’s face for the last time. He thought of visiting his mother’s funeral as wasting time and contemplating his boss's reaction to his four-day vacation. He went swimming, started dating a girl, and went to see a comic film upon returning to his mother’s cortege. He was smoking before the dead body was traditionally thought of as disrespectful.

Besides, he can generate a self-interpretation of his own will. He killed an Arab due to the sun on his eyes. The absurd man who does not hesitate to draw an inevitable conclusion from a fundamental absurdity. We can still find similar examples in recent times like Tafazal’s murder in DU, no logical interpretation. The meaninglessness of human life is deeply explored after Meursault's arrest. Camus argues that life has no purpose and that death is the only certainty in life and, because eventually, all humans will have to face it, all lives are equally meaningless.

A very interesting revelation in the trial session, he is out and out an atheist, so religion becomes a predicament, turning the entire society against him. He tries desperately to prove that he loves his mother as everyone does. Even he never tried to conceal his emotions when Marie proposed to marry him, and he directly confessed to her that he did not love her at all. As his actions do not correlate with society, he becomes a stranger or a foreigner in that society.

The Stranger focuses on one man’s isolation and alienation from society, friends, lovers, and even human emotions. The writer challenges the societal norms with Meursault character. By studying the novel, one thing is clear The Myth of Sisyphus is that Meursault, the protagonist of The Stranger, suffers for his ideas, while in The Myth of Sisyphus, it is Camus, the author, who must suffer for his ideas. Camus presents a challenge to education in the ways that it is contemporaneously conceptualized—as a unique capitalist enterprise—in that he alludes to the idea that we might need to suspend our focus on the outcome, the consequences of which we cannot know if we are to explore the nature of the positive truth that can be found in the question of whether life has any value.

The writer is a Final year Student, Department of English Comilla University