First of all, I want to assume the question, the question is, when all the people around you are crying, or when you encounter something that everyone thinks should be crying, what do you do? The answer has three options:
A is really crying like everyone else
B, although he doesn't want to cry, he will also fake crying with everyone
C, don't cry, why do I have to cry, stick to my own ideas.
If you chose answer C, it's worth listening to The Outsider. When others cry their noses and wipe their tears, you don't cry, the consequences will be very serious, how serious is it? Let me take my time.
Camus was the youngest Nobel laureate in literature, and he was under 44 years old when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Outsider is Camus's masterpiece and his masterpiece, and this novel is also a masterpiece of absurdist literature.
In my opinion, Camus is like the child who dared to tell the truth in Andersen's fairy tale "The Emperor's New Clothes", the child who dared to be the first to shout that the emperor was not wearing any clothes. This is how "The Outsider" feels to me, telling the truth that many people dare not or do not want to say.
The Outsider Is a novel that is sharp, wise, lyrical, lies, or empty words, and Camus said in a speech in December 1957: "In the face of the times, the artist can neither abandon nor get lost in it." If he abandons it, he will speak empty words. It can be seen from this that Camus has always had the artistic consciousness of not speaking empty words.
Camus was born in 1913 to a family of agricultural workers in the City of Mondovy, Algeria, North Africa. His mother is Spanish. His father was French. His father was wounded and died in World War I in 1914. Camus grew up in the slums with his widowed mother, the children of the poor were early in charge, Camus's life was particularly difficult when he was a child, and in order to survive, he lived all kinds of miscellaneous work. He completed secondary school on a scholarship, and was subsequently able to complete the University of Algiers with the support of relatives and friends and part-time work, and obtained a bachelor's degree in philosophy, but was unable to take the teacher's title examination due to tuberculosis. At the age of twenty-five, he came to France as a journalist and soon became famous in the capital, becoming a first-class writer.
In modern French literature, Camus is on a par with Sartre. Sartre thought our world was a "dirty world," while Camus saw it as an "absurd world." As an advocate of absurdist literature, Camus strives to portray everything in the human world and real society as indifferent and absurd in his creations. His characters are people with such absurd feelings, who are always out of place with society, who always feel that living in the world is an accidental mistake, so they regard themselves as an "outsider" who has nothing to do with the world. The typical image of this "outsider" was created by Camus in his first novel, The Outsider, published in 1942. The Outsider is Camus's masterpiece and his masterpiece.
The Chinese translation of the novel is only 50,000 words, there are not too many long and unfamiliar foreign names to remember, and there are no protracted and lengthy descriptions of scenes, which makes people read very smoothly.
"The Outsider" tells a rough story: Today, maybe yesterday, Meursault's mother died. Meursault went to the nursing home for the funeral, and not only did he not cry, but he did not even look at his mother's body. After the funeral, Meursault quickly made a girlfriend and became friends with his neighbor Raymond. Meursault went to the beach with Raymond and the others for a weekend, and Meursault inexplicably shot an Arab who had a festival with Raymond "because of the sunshine". Meursault was then tried, but in prison and in court, Meursault's role was always like an outsider, not very concerned about his fate, while lawyers, judges, and priests became the protagonists. In the end, because Meursault's mother died without crying, because she did not believe in Christianity, she was sentenced to death, and was executed.
The plot of the novel is also not complicated, and some publishers have summarized the novel in this way;
They said, Mom was dead, I didn't cry; it was merciless, damn it.
Messing around with his girlfriend the next day; it's filial piety, damn it.
Provoke friends and enemies to fight each other; it is unjust, damn it.
I am incommunicado with heaven and earth, and the people and gods are indignant,
But what is the set you are trying to use to save me?
I killed people,
Just because the summer sun is too harsh...
I will interpret the novel from three parts.
First, is the protagonist of the novel, Meursault, an idiot?
Second, why did Meursault be sentenced to death without crying?
Third, what is the absurdity that the novel is trying to express?
First of all, is meursault, the protagonist of the first point of the novel, an idiot?
The protagonist of the novel, Meursault, is an extremely indifferent person, who does not care about anything, whether there is or not. He does not pretend, and can be regarded as a person who is consistent in appearance. Raymond asked: Would you like to make me a friend? He said, I don't know, I don't care.
The girlfriend asked him if he loved her, and he said no.
Meursault's girlfriend, Mary, came to him and asked him if he would marry her. He said it didn't matter. If she wants to tie the knot, then do it. Then Mary wondered if Meursault loved her. Meursault replied, as he had done last time, saying that the question itself was meaningless, though he thought he probably didn't love her. Mary asked again: Then why did you marry me? Meursault explained that this is really not the point, and since she likes to get married, why not get married? Besides, she came to ask him first, he just needed to say good, why not... Mary hypothetically asked if she were to be so close to him as another girl, would he also agree to get married? Meursault replied: "Of course." What an honest man! It's a bit flattering. He seemed cruel to tell the truth about the marriage.
When the lawyer checked with Meursault whether he felt the pain of losing his mother, Meursault said, "I should have liked my mother quite a lot," and added in a shocking and shocking way, "Every person of sound mind has more or less hoped that the person he loves will die." Zhao Xiaoli, a teacher at Tsinghua University, commented on this sentence, "It seems that Meursault has revealed a psychological fact that is prevalent in this society." ”
His girlfriend called Meursault a "weirdo," but he wasn't a good guy, but he wasn't a complete bad guy. On the surface, he is indifferent to his mother, and the novel does not describe in detail their previous daily lives, so the reader cannot judge whether Meursault is completely unfilial. Meursault at least did not abuse his mother. With this alone, compared to many unfilial children in the world, he still has a conscience. He was almost responsive to his neighbors, and he was a warm-hearted man.
So, is There something wrong with Meursault's mind? The head is missing a string. No, he has a job and a mind. It can be said that Meursault is neither an idiot nor a barbarian, nor a person who lacks rationality than ordinary people. He was a sober man with normal sanity. The reader should ask, what is the basis for you to say this? According to Camus's preface to the American edition of The Outsider, Camus said in that preface: "He was far from insensitive, he harbored an obsessive and deep passion, a passion for the absolute and the true. ”
To understand the character of Meursault, one can refer to a philosophical essay by Camus, "The Absurd Man," in which Camus wrote: What does a ridiculous man actually look like? He does not seek eternity, he himself does not deny this, he is not unfamiliar with nostalgia, but prefers his own courage and reasoning. Courage taught him not to seek others in life and to cherish what he had; reasoning made him clear about his boundaries. Convinced that his freedom was short and limited, that his rebellion had no future, and that he had become enlightened about life and death, he would in his lifetime be to carry out his own adventures. This is his domain, this is his actions, and he will not accept any judgment from others.
This philosophical essay is from the book "The Myth of Sisyphus", "The Myth of Sisyphus" and the four-act play "Caligula" and "The Outsider", these three works of different genres, form Camus's absurd trilogy, thus forming Camus's unique absurd philosophy.
To put it this way, the author would never write about a serious discussion of social problems through an idiot, in which case it would be better not to discuss it, because then there is still any convincing.
In fact, it is not how different Meursault is, but people are accustomed to hypocrisy, accustomed to being a person in a trap. The German philosopher Nietzsche once said, Nietzsche said: "The beings of the world are bound by various rules and regulations, and their behavior must be carried out according to specific patterns." These people live entirely in the ideology of others and lose the ability to think and act on their own. They think, treat people and things, and deal with problems in a uniform way that is prescribed, as if they were not alive. ”
So Meursault is a normal person. So, didn't he kill people? He was the one who killed in a confused situation. Who hasn't made a mistake in a vacuum?
Now for the second point, why did Meursault be sentenced to death without crying?
Didn't he not catch people because he killed people? Is murder inherently punishable by death?
It would be wrong to think so, because Meursault killed people from the French colonies, and the slain Arabs showed their knives first. And in the judge's trial, there was little talk of how he was guilty of murder, and the court paid much more attention to Meursault's soul than to the nameless Arab. Raymond's mistress, the sister of the slain Arab, and his companions who were killed Arabs, did not appear on the witness stand in the Meursault murders.
In fact, in the eyes of the judge, Meursault's most serious mistake was not to believe in Christianity, and not shed tears when his mother was buried, which was much more serious than killing. If he hadn't been so stubborn, he wouldn't have been executed, and finally the prosecutor came to the conclusion that the prosecutor said, "I accuse this man of burying his mother with the heart of a criminal!" The prosecutor also found that Meursault's case was homogeneous with a father-killing case to be heard by the Court. The reason given by the prosecutor was that "a person who mentally kills his mother is as intolerable to society as a person whose hands are stained with the blood of his loved ones, because the causes of the former may lead to the results of the latter", although such reasons sound far-fetched, they do not delay the prosecutor's righteous words.
Camus once summed up the theme of The Outsider in one sentence: "In our society, anyone who does not cry during the burial of his mother is in danger of being sentenced to death." ”
When everyone else is crying, you don't cry, you become a different kind, you become the target of everyone. Historically, are there still fewer alternatives that have been surrounded and suppressed by groups?
Mo Yan once said: "When everyone is crying, some people should be allowed not to cry." ”
Mo Yan said this sentence at the Nobel Prize in Literature ceremony. He told the story that in the 1960s, when Mo Yan was in the third grade of elementary school, the school organized students to go to an exhibition of suffering, and the students cried under the guidance of the teacher. In order to let the teacher see his performance, Mo Yan was reluctant to wipe the tears from his face. Mo Yan said he saw several classmates quietly smearing spit on their faces to pass on tears. He also saw that among the students who were really crying and fake crying, there was a classmate who did not have a tear on his face, did not have a sound in his mouth, and did not cover his face with his hands. He looked at us with wide eyes, a look of surprise or confusion in his eyes. Afterwards, Mo Yan reported the classmate's behavior to the teacher. For this reason, the school gave the classmate a warning punishment. Years later, when Mo Yan confessed to the teacher for his informant, the teacher said that there were more than a dozen classmates who came to him that day to talk about it.
Mo Yan concluded: "This classmate died more than ten years ago, and whenever I think of him, I feel deeply sorry. This incident made me realize a truth, that is, when everyone is crying, some people should be allowed not to cry. When crying becomes a performance, it is more important to allow some people not to cry. ”
Now, to the third point, what is the absurdity that the novel wants to express?
For this novel, I am afraid that what is important is not whether the protagonist should be sentenced to death, but whether Meursault should be judged by the soul. He does not know his sins until his death, which is certainly not right, ruining a person's life, he is ultimately wrong, but there is no need for him to accept the judgment of the soul? Moreover, those trials went far beyond the examination of the motives for the commission of the crime. Prosecutors and judges want to strangle not his body, but his soul. Later, the pastor tried to judge his soul through God, but failed. In Chinese words, if killing people is not a head," why judge my soul? Who doesn't have evil in their heart? Can the soul of a judge stand up to trial?
Meursault did not cry when his mother died, he just did not show the sadness he deserved, and finally because of the shooting and killing, he was caught out of his previous indifference and writing letters for Raymond. When a person makes a mistake, he churns out all the previous mistakes of this person, in order to prove that this person has always been very bad, and it is simply heinous. Such a situation, we readers are probably not unfamiliar, in real life, there has always been a lot of icing on the cake or falling into the well, very few people can send charcoal in the snow.
Why do you have to cry when your loved one dies? Zhuangzi's wife died, Huizi hung her, and Zhuangzi sang in a drum bowl. As for fooling around with his lover, it is actually nothing, for example, Tiger Woods was revealed to be fooling around with his mistress No. 4 when his father was dying. This is Tiger Woods' No. 4 mistress to the British "World News" to break the news.
Meursault said, "What does the death of others, the love of mothers, his God, the lives chosen by others, the chosen destiny of others have to do with me?" "He's such a contradictory figure, he's cold, he's extreme, but he's not entirely wrong. For example, can't he say, "His God, the life chosen by others, the fate chosen by others has nothing to do with me"? Is he wrong not to believe in Christianity?
Lu Simian has a sentence in the general history of China, which I agree with, he said: "The modern family is not so much derived from human nature as it is from the situation of life." The idea of moral immorality is rooted in habit; habits arise from life. ”
In my opinion, Meursault's worst mistake was not to perform. When it's time to perform, isn't your performance finished? When everyone else can cry, if you don't cry, you're a hated outlier. George Bernard Shaw said: Don't hesitate, all we can do is judge.
The Outsider concludes, and this is also Meursault's last monologue: In the face of a night full of information and stars, I opened my heart for the first time to the moving indifference of this world. I experienced the world being so much like me, so loving, and I felt like I had been happy in the past and I am still happy. In order to make everything perfect, in order to make me feel less lonely, I also hoped that on the day of my execution there would be many people who would come to watch and hope that they would cry out in hatred for me.
Why should I read this passage? Aren't you surprised to hear this spiritual monologue? Meursault turned out to be happy, once happy, and still happy. Meursault wasn't insane because he was about to be executed, right? How could he possibly be sentenced to death or be happy?
This is to be solved from Camus's philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus.
Sisyphus is a figure in Greek mythology who was punished by him in hell for doing such a job all the time, rolling a boulder to the top of the mountain, and then the boulder rolling down, and Sisyphus pushing the boulder to the top of the mountain, over and over again, never ending. In Camus's eyes, this became a symbol of simplicity in human life. Camus believed that Sisyphus was very happy in the depths of his soul, because the attempt itself satisfied him.
This is obviously only Camus's hypothesis, and the reason why Camus hypothesized that Sisyphus was happy was because he believed that only a happy life was in accord with human dignity, and that although punished forever, it was also happiness, which was a form of rebellion, and the only possible form of rebellion under such conditions, and that resistance could embody dignity. Camus made full use of imagination and arbitrariness in assuming that Sisyphus was happy, but his subtext was the need for human dignity. From the absurd point of departure, Sartre moves toward anxiety and uneasiness, while Camus moves toward happiness, Sartre is the conclusion of speculation, and Camus is a lyric of wishful thinking. The Sisyphus myth concludes: "But Sisyphus admonishes us that there is a higher fidelity that it can deny the gods and lift up the boulders." He eventually found out that everything was fine. From then on, this universe without a master was neither barren nor hopeless to him... The struggle to the heights is enough to fill one's mind, and one should imagine that Sisyphus is happy. ”
For Camus, the essential question is no longer whether life is worth living or not, but how to live with the torture it caused.
Meursault said: "The living people are the lucky ones, and there is only one kind of person in the world." "Sincerely, it is all just accidents, and where there is any inevitability in this world, an accidental factor is enough to destroy a person's life." Camus's death is a note that on January 4, 1960, Camus took a friend's hitchhiker from Provence. In Paris, a car accident occurred on the way, and Camus died on the spot, at the age of 47. A literary giant has left unexpectedly, and life and the world are so absurd!