The Stranger by Albert Camus Part One Chapter I - Chapter III

Mersault lives in Algiers. They way this novel starts is with the death of the narraroters mother. After this happens Mersault doesn’t show very much emotion. Meursault shows himself to be indifferent toward emotion and interaction with others. Instead of grieving because his mother died, he is cold and shows now emotion. When he receives the telegram, his concern is figuring out on which day his mother died. If someone like that closed to me died I would be grieving not be so out of place that I don’t know what day my own mother died. There is no way we can really characterize Mersault because if we knew that he was happy about his mothers death we can say how he is immoral. But since he is niether sad nor happy he is simply indifferent. The relationship of him and Marie is also shown as cold and short which makes us very curious about him