Questioning and Critical Thinking Response

The Stranger
Questioning and Critical Thinking Response

Tanasha Kardeo



1.      What evidence is there that Meursault didn’t care about his mother?

 In this novel Meursault show numerous occasions that indicates he didn’t care for his mother a few of those are when he only visited his mother once at the Home she was residing in. If Meursault couldn’t afford to have his mother stay with he could have at least went to visit her, and complaining that he had to lose his Sunday and the traveling time was too long. “That was why the last year; I seldom went to see her. Also it would have meant losing my Sunday-not to mention the trouble of going to the bus, getting my ticket and spending two hours on the journey each way”(Camus 5). Meursault shows his lack of love for his mother again when he realized that he’d be going back to work soon and nothing had changed. It showed that whether his mother was alive or dead it didn’t make difference for him, it was like he hadn’t lost anything and it was just another Sunday getting ready to go back to work tomorrow “It occurred to me that somehow I’d got through another Sunday, that Mother now was buried and tomorrow I’d be going back to work as usual. Really, nothing in my life had changed” (Camus 17)

2.     What background information does the reader receive about Meursault from reading the first 3 lines?

From reading the first three lines of this novel the reader understands that there is a reason as to why Meursault does not know when his mother had died. In a way this is foreshadowing because it is quiet predictable that the next few paragraphs are going to state why he wasn’t not aware of his mother well being. It also makes the reader curious to know what had gone wrong in the relationship between him and his mother and allows the reader to think of possible reasons that could have lead to that