The Stranger Reflection Chapter 1-4

“Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: ‘Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.’ That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.” Page 1

This quote is the opening line of the novel. It is an amazing way to open a novel, at first it might seem like trivial information but it isn’t. It shows a key trait of the main character. He is indifferent, unemotional. The fact that his mother’s death is a very irrelevant subject and that he decides to focus on the day she died, shows his existentialist persona. The sentence “that doesn’t mean anything” could be interpreted in two ways. First you could say that the telegram doesn’t reveal the date of Maman’s death. This one is more explicit, one could even argue that subconsciously when Mersault says “That doesn’t mean anything” he is referring that his mother’s death is not of great importance.

“I would rather not have upset him, but I couldn’t see any reason to change my life. Looking back on it, I wasn’t unhappy. When I was a student, I had lots of ambitions like that. But when I had to give up studies I learned very quickly that none of it really mattered.” P 41

“None of it really mattered”. This quote shows once again Mersault’s existentialist nature, he has lost hope in life and doesn’t care about anything. He lives life on a moment-to-moment basis. Not regretting the past, not thinking anxiously about the future. He mentions that he lost hope after he was forced to quit his studies. That can show that he will eventually recover hope, or to the contrary he may continue down this existentialist path. It is too early to tell but given that he is an existentialist, he is unpredictable and may drift to the other side of the spectrum at any moment.