The foreigner and its history
Introduction
Within the difficult chronology of World War II, 1942 was the least auspicious years for allied forces: London daily endured the air attacks of the Luftwaffe, which Churchill asked to fight with blood, sweat and tears;The invasion of the Soviet Russia of Stalin began;Paris continued for the third year under the complete domain of the German forces, and many of the Jewish citizens suffered a true massacre in the concentration camps of Eastern Europe. In this catastrophe environment, Albert Camus, Algeria publishes the foreigner, his first novel.
Developing
It makes Mersault known, its most enduring antihero and character of the discomfort of the European member civilization. In an immediate way, the foreigner prompted its author to recognition never seen before that it would make him one of the most influential intellectual voices in his time. The numerous studies of all size that have been carried out around this work, agree to recognize the existentialist character that surrounds both the scenarios and its main character. Vargas Llosa, in "The foreigner she must die", including the truth of lies.
It highlights the dehumanized world of the novel and the fierce individualism of Mersault, individualism that identifies us secretly, because in each of us there is a prisoner who would like to be like Mersault. The opinion of Vargas Llosa is only one of the many that have been poured by the foreigner, the most translated and admired novel of its author. No literary work, in reality, has a unique sense or remains oblivious to interpretations that are historically different from those predominated in the time of its. Each reader creates new ways of interpreting the works according to their forms of reading.
My central purpose, in the following lines, is to ask me about the validity of the foreigner among us, in the case of a book that undoubtedly dialogues productively with the existentialist thinking developed by the great Algerian writer. The foreigner addresses the problem of existentialism, which Camus will develop through the use of texts such as the myth of Sisyphus. In this regard, the word "existentialism" is already ambiguous. For many, more than a philosophical or thought current, it was a "mood" derived from the environment of regret for the disasters of war.
For Jean Paul Sartre, who will coined the term, existentialism must be understood as a doctrine according to which existence always precedes the essence. This conception was at least paradoxical, because with it Sartre went against traditional philosophical positions that, from Socrates, argued that the essence precedes and gives meaning our life: in this way, every really ‘existing man could be judged and judgedA agreement with those ‘essential’ (religious, ethical, spiritual) parameters that preceded him and gave meaning to his life.
Nietzsche, one of the precursors of existentialism, turned 180 degrees to this traditional conception with his famous sentence: "God has died". And without God, figuratively, there is no essence in which men can be reflected, there is no meaning or destiny that guides their passage through the world. In ‘Existentialism is a humanism’, Sartre argues that man is alone, did not ask to be born, but he is still on earth, freed his fate and forced to choose his actions to survive. In this way, it is our own decisions and behaviors that end up defining what we are.
The existence, then, when in 1940, for political reasons, Albert Camus leaves his native Algeria and settled in Paris, found a disaster atmosphere produced by war and the traumatic German occupation of France. According to his biographers, it was most likely this painful scenario that led him to abrasar and to conceive a form of existentialism: the absurdity. Recall that Nietzsche affirmed decades ago that God had died, but this expression will have to reinterpret and sharpen in the hands of Camus. According to Camust, who has never existed: there are no gods.
conclusion
Life makes no sense and is a total absurd, "absurdity" presides over each and every one of the experiences of modern reality. The absurdity of existence is that humans have been thrown into the world without any verifiable destiny in addition to death. In the myth of Sisyphus the author himself explains it like this: "The absurdity is the confrontation between the feeling of the irrational and the overwhelming longing of clarity that resonates in the depths of man". The absurd, then, consists of the useless search for meaning in a universe lacking it.
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