Extract
[...] We find this same tension a little later in Albert Camus' novel: 'The sun was now crushing. It was breaking into pieces on the sand and on the sea. I had the impression that Raymond knew where he was going, but that was probably not true. At the very end of the beach, we finally arrived at a small spring that flowed into the sand, behind a large rock. There, we found our two Arabs. They were lying down, in their greasy overalls. [...]
[...] And that's why some readers have been tempted to consider him as a wreck. However, one will have a more accurate idea of the character, more in line with the intentions of its author, if one asks in what Meursault does not play the game. The answer is simple: he refuses to lie'9. » The deep otherness of Meursault, which condemns him to live on the periphery of a completely blossomed love life in the traditional sense, at least with Marie, for example, which prevents him from living a friendly relationship with Raymond, in the sense that society tends to present friendship, is therefore his inability to lie. [...]
[...] The stranger that is Meursault is not less within society. His solitude, which does not prevent his awareness of others, is all the stronger, as sociologist Simmel points out: 'the feeling of solitude rarely appears as clearly and penetratingly in the case of a real physical isolation as when one finds oneself among people who are physically very close - in a society, in a train, in a lively crowd of a great city - and knows oneself to be a stranger and without relations with them'7 ». [...]
[...] The first being made up of the natives, the second of the colonizers. We find this same confrontation in Camus' short story entitled The Guest. We can rely on the Sartrean analysis carried out earlier to explain how the character in the short story named Daru is completely filled with racist prejudices. He thus evokes his lips: "enormous lips, full, smooth, almost Negroid"14 » : « The alternation between ethical and colonialist, or even racist, impulses will not end until Daru falls asleep in his room, the Arab by his side. [...]
[...] He no longer feels this discomfort in the courtyard of the high school. On the other hand, his mother and grandmother are still in this foreign world to the bourgeois world where he takes into consideration that he is moving away from them. We note in this regard the expression 'mean pride' that he reuses. We understand that he becomes aware of the feeling of power that gives material possession, financial power that he is only beginning to discover at this moment. [...]
