Mysterious Meursault

First off, lets define existentialism. According to dictionary.com existentialism is "a philosophical attitude...that stresses the individual's unique position as a self-determining agent responsible for the authenticity of his or her choices." Throughout Albert Camus's novel The Stranger, his main character Meursault demonstrates a present only, attitude of living. Meursault's mother dies, and after attending the burial and returning to his home, instead of mourning he simply thinks "It occurred to me that anyway one more Sunday was over, that Maman was buried now, that I was going back to work, and that, really, nothing had changed."(pg. 26). The past or future not once crosses his mind. The audience would expect to read about a depressed character, when in fact that character makes a bigger deal about it being a Sunday, then about his Maman's death.

While his philosophical view may hold his feelings back and lack of interest in new environments, it also provides Meursault with the life of a curious "adventurer". For example, one night Meursault was dinning at Celeste's. As he was eating a strange women asked if she could sit with him. He watched eagerly watched her every move. After dinner he decided the lady intrigued him and he watched the women put her jacket on and leave. "I didn't have anything to do, so i left to and followed her for a while."(pg. 43). This decision was made on the spot much like all his other ones. Meursault never really thinks through what he is going to do on a specific day. He just does what he feels like in the order that the opportunities come.

Colorless Gray

"Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight."

The Great Gatsby, Ch 2. 

          Fitzgerald uses multiple colors in his text to express his ideas. In the quote above, gray is implicitly used as a color of no hope or no vast changes in the future. The "ash-grey men" are of a low hard-working class that are constantly living in a dull and ash bound environment. The way in which the men "immediately" began working is Fitzgerald's way of telling the reader that these men have been repitetively working on the same job. These men are stuck here for generations because nothing good will ever happen in a valley of darkness, or the valley of gray. Just as the "impenetrable cloud" hides the the workers. The Valley of Ashes is ignored by the wealthy in West Egg. It takes part of their fictional world as unreal or inexistent. Since no one that can make a difference acknowledges the society hidden in the valley of Ashes, gray then represents no success. Failure is permanently surrounding them in clouds of ash.