The Absurd Morality of Death in The Outsider Essay -- The Outsider Dea

The Absurd Morality of Death in The Outsider In The Outsider by Albert Camus, death can clearly be seen as a significant image - there being six deaths mentioned in total. In Part One we are shown the natural death of Meursault's mother and Meursault's murder of the Arab, and in Part Two we are presented with the parricide of a brother/son and the subsequent suicide of the perpetrators, another parricide that is to be tried after Meursault's case and the death penalty pronounced on Meursault. Through these depictions of various deaths, Camus shows clearly the conflicting and often arbitrary treatment of death within society, a treatment that reveals a confusion between the motives behind acts and the subsequent response to the completed acts, which ultimately reflects the nature of the absurd prevalent in the novel. Section One: deaths directly linked to Meursault Mrs Meursault's Funeral Death, as an important image, is established in the very first sentence of the book, "Mother died today."[1] The simplicity and directness of this statement is shocking for the reader, and leads us to try to understand what sort of man Meursault is - a task that we discover later has been laid as a trap for us. However, even though this first sentence is simple and direct, it is confused in the very next sentence, "Or maybe yesterday, I don't know."[2] This confusion over the time of the death can be generalised to the circumstances of the death, which are in this case unclear, and indeed we are never told what the cause of Mrs Meursault's death was. All we have are the allusions to her age, "About sixty,"[3] and her 'friend', who was "an old man"[4] that could not prevent himself from "fainting (like a disloca... ...t, The Outsider (Penguin Classics), p60. [13] Ibid. P69. [14] Ibid. P63. [15] Ibid. P64. [16] Ibid. P85. [17] Ibid. P85. [18] Ibid. P57. [19] Ibid. P58. [20] Ibid. P58. [21] Ibid. P60 [22] Camus, Albert, The Outsider (Penguin Classics, 2000), p64 [23] Ibid. P68. [24] Ibid. P98. [25] Ibid. P99. [26] Ibid. P116 [27] Ibid. P103. [28] Camus, Albert, The Outsider (Penguin Classics, 2000), p104. [29] Ibid. P109. [30] Ibid. P109. [31] Ibid. P114. [32] Ibid. P112. [33] Ibid. P115. [34] Ibid. P117. [35] Ibid. P117. [36] Camus, Albert, The Outsider (Penguin Classics, 2000), p77. [37] Ibid. P78. [38] Camus, Albert, The Outsider (Penguin Classics, 2000), p 78. [39] Ibid. P78 [40] Ibid. P82. [41] Ibid. P82. [42] Ibid. P102. [43] Camus, Albert, The Outsider (Penguin Classics, 2000), p116.