Saturday, February 9, 2008
Stranger Question
-"But everybody knows life isn't worth living. Deep down I knew perfectly well that it doesn't much matter whether you die at thirty or at seventy, since in either case other men and women will naturally go on living-and for thousands of years." (114 Camus) Does Meursault truly not care about life and want to die, or does this quote have another meaning?
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2 comments:
I think the meaning of this quote is "change". Meursalt, during the first half of the book, seemed to only care about the here and now. If he wanted a smoke, he got a smoke. If he was hungry, he fed himself. He didn't plan his day out in advance, he just did whatever came to him.
This quote along with the rest of the paragraph if I recall correctly, indicates his change from seeing things in the "here and now" to looking ahead. He's finally beging to realise he might have another twenty years of his natural life left.
sorry, the enter key randomly posted the message before I finished. Whatever.
This looking ahead is a big change for Meursalt. It's new, it's different. If he would have realized this earlier in the novel, he may have never shot the Arab or, at least, he would have lied about why he shot the Arab.
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