The Stranger by Albert Camus

Meursault, a Frenchman, gets caught in a murder mess in The Stranger. He shot a man out of self-defense, but during his trial he is judged cold-blooded because of his apparently callous reaction to his mother's death, and so is considered capable of premeditated murder. He is condemned to the death penalty.

A striking aspect of the narrative is how logical Meursault's reaction to his mother's death seems at the beginning. For when it is examined in a courtroom, it really does appear condemning. Meursault was fascinating- a resigned, indifferent individual, concerned mostly with sensual pleasure when concerned with anything at all.

He was one of those who just go through the motions of life, not caring about the past, not anticipating the future. He was quite a peculiar sort of atheist, countering the chaplain calmly, asking what God had to do with anything, quite unperturbed. He really had no concept of God at all. I was as unsure of how to react to such measured indifference as the chaplain was.

Altogether, the story was that of a man's response to his imminent death; or, at least, it culminated in that. Meursault just reasons he was going to die eventually, and if it happened thirty years before he had expected it to, what then? What difference did it make?

And yet, one would think it made all the difference in the world. For how could Meursault know he had got the meaning of life, or the lack thereof, right? Isn't it presumptuous to assume one has absolute knowledge when one has experienced such a neglible fraction of all there is in the universe? Maybe another thirty years would have revealed a more concrete conclusion than that all that there is, is nothing.