Albert. Camus, the exponent of absurdism and nobel laureate in literature, talks about his most famous work, except for "The Myth of Sisyphus", which metaphorically describes the fate of mankind, which is "The Outsider".
The novel begins with the protagonist Meursault attending his mother's funeral, and when his closest relative dies, he indifferently goes through the whole process as if he were dealing with official affairs.
Not limited to this funeral, Meursault treated everything in life with a slight attitude of indifference, as if it was not himself who lived here, but some outsider who had nothing to do with him.
The twist of events occurs when Meursault accidentally kills an Arab "because of the sun," and the second part revolves around Meursault's verdict.
The absurdity of the story is that Meursault was sentenced to death on the grounds that he did not shed tears at his mother's funeral, so he was accused by the prosecutor of "burying a mother with the heart of a murderer."
Meursault's death, in the final analysis, did not lie in the fact that he killed the Arab, but because he was an "outsider" who deviated from the "public order and good customs" in the eyes of the "world".
The word outsider represents not only Meursault's way of life, but also a vivid description of his relationship with the world at large.
And Miao Yu, who calls himself "Outsider of the Threshold" in "Dream of the Red Chamber", is quite similar.
"Too tall people are more jealous, and the world is the same as the same suspicion", just like Zhuangzi chose to drum in the face of his wife's death and sang without being understood by his friend Keiko, Meursault's behavior of not shedding tears in the face of his mother's death has never been understood by the "world", which then led to death.
In essence, Camus, through Meursault, questioned the value system of human society for thousands of years, why can't we choose a way of living away from "routine"?
When Meursault turned his gaze beyond the mundane life, all he gained was loneliness.
This kind of loneliness is not a casual encounter of Haruki Murakami's "Sputnik lovers", a loneliness that is immediately difficult to find, but a loneliness as an outsider isolated from the entire human society.
Meursault is not so much absurd as the whole world. And when the world itself is in the midst of absurdity, what about the only sober person? So he eventually died by choosing a lifestyle that was different from most people's value systems.
I can't help but think of Sun Wukong's path to immortality, "I see that the people of the world are all disciples who are named for profit, and none of them are for the sake of life." ”
The most important philosophical proposition of the nineteenth century was "God is dead", while sartre, Camus and others in the twentieth century faced the philosophical proposition of "man is dead".
Since God did not exist, the universe was nothing more than an accident after the Big Bang, and everything that mankind constructed, like a grain of sand in the sea, was insignificant, so what was the meaning of life?
Camus chose to fight the absurd with the absurd, "life is more worth living because it has no meaning."
When Sisyphus chose to take the initiative to push the boulder, he surpassed this tragic fate.
Reading "The Outsider" is a process of re-examining life, whether we live in a predetermined value or choose the path of life ourselves.
Camus's "The Myth of Sisyphus", "Caligula", and "The Outsider" are collectively called the absurd trilogy, and interested friends can read them one by one.