The Relatable Stranger: How and Why We Are Meursault Using his existentialist text The Stranger as a vehicle for his philosophical ideals, the absurdist Albert Camus asks an essential question for the human existence: when freed from the shackles of a tediously perpetuated social routine, how does a man function? Embodying the answer to this question is Monsieur Meursault, whose once rational speech and logical action reveal themselves in the heat of circumstance to illustrate what Camus considers “the nakedness of man in the face of the absurd.” Possessing the characteristics of any respectable gentleman, Meursault is honest, sensitive and extremely adaptable to the shifting universe around him, replacing senseless rhetoric and the excuse of emotional abundance with a sharpness of thought and a propensity for raw sensations. By structuring his philosophy around a man with such a non-specific and therefore recognizable identity, Camus evokes sympathy by touching on the bestial need for freedom for the individual, derided by a society interested only in the docile collective. Pay little attention to unspoken and presumed truths. of the culture in which he lives, Meursault follows a more natural and almost physiological rhythm of emotion and sensuality. After learning of his mother's death, to go to the funeral he will have to travel "about eighty kilometers from Algiers" (Camus 3). Rather than emphasizing the exhaustive capacity of trauma, Meursault appeals to reason, explaining that “it was probably because of all the running here and there, and on top of that the bumpy ride, the smell of gasoline and the glow of the sky and of the road, that [he] dozed off” (Camus 4). Having returned home from the funeral, he wakes up the next morning and decides to take a bath in the pu...... middle of paper...... in the indifference of the world” (Camus 122). Once sympathy for Meursault is secured, a natural disapproval of the society that condemns him will form. By holding a mirror up to the very society this text seeks to describe, the novel forces those who read it to reevaluate their seemingly natural assumptions regarding the “frivolous indulgence” of emotions, the cold immobility of morality, and, above all, the purpose of judgment ( Camus 40). In his essay on the guillotine, Camus defines compassion as that which “does not exclude punishment, but [that] withholds final condemnation” (Camus 40). By creating a recognizable character like Meursault, Albert Camus attempts to instill compassion in an otherwise indifferent society, serving as a catalyst for a reaction that sympathizes and reconsiders what essentially makes us human..