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I wonder what it is that causes me to take such great pleasure from reading protagonists so steeped in depressed ennui. My love for authors like Carver, Murakami, and now Camus always surprises me because I consider myself a rather passionate and content person. I'm not wealthy, nor more talented in any significant way than any other. I work a relatively normal 9-5 and I have no great ambitions or dreams. Yet I enjoy my life thoroughly. Why is it, then, that so many of the writers I enjoy choose to deal with such ennui? Is it because I'm so unremarkable that I'm capable of such contentedness? Or have I somehow learned to live in this manner through my enjoyment of such tortured, lonesome outsiders as Meursault?

Camus utilizes meager, dead, disconnected prose which assaults us with Meursault's dead apathy; he drily confronts the death of his mother, his neighbor beating his dog, his friend beating his mistress, and his girlfriend propose marriage to him—all momentous occasions to which he reacts with a stunning lack of emotion. I felt viscerally the stressed difference between my own reactions as the reader and Meursault's lack of concern. The contrast was strong, jarring, and deliberate.

Perhaps what I enjoyed most was how Meursault's awakening was depicted via the change in Camus' prose. It begins depicting the grayed, deadened character of Meursault. He's a man so steeped in his own banal existence that his life's course is driven purely by societal norms to nearly comical effect. He can't bring himself to mourn, pity, or love. He's a man incapable of making a decision. He has no great passions nor small desires. He neither fears nor dreads any potential events. He's effectively a sociopath.

Meursault's impactful event that sets him on the course of change is a momentous one; indeed, one few of us would ever be forced to deal with. One which would undoubtedly break any who'd experience it, as it does to Meursault. Perhaps such negative life events force us to re-examine our existence; we find faith, we find obsession, or, at worst, we're broken so badly we're unable to recover and turn to violence or suicide. Camus' prose opens markedly after Meursault's rebirth and flows, winding down the page. After a hundred pages of one-word answers, Maursault gives an impassioned tirade as to the meaning of it all; what is it all for? In the end, he's broken free of his chains of ennui and his banal existence reforms him in a manner in which he's finally capable of such passion, and realizes he's free to choose his own reason for and manner of being—or not to choose.

I have lingering questions about Camus' narrative. What caused Meursault to become so deadened in the first place? Would Camus suggest that modernism itself renders us so deteriorated, so robbed of any passion? And how can I apply some of what this story has made me feel to further enrich my own life? Am I really so contented? And, shit—did I really grasp what Camus was trying to say in the first place? Clearly I've got more reading to do, but these kinds of questions are why I read this kind of literature in the first place. I'll probably re-read this again in the future in order to re-examine these questions. I doubt they'll all ever be answered, but nobody really wants to know how the magician does his tricks... Do they?