How to live? How to reach meaning with God in decline and the singularity of individual consciousness on the rise? These have never been questions defined by the shapeliness or wholeness of their answers; their very urgency has tended to provoke a response of fragments. But, occasionally, what beautiful fragments.
Jean-Paul Sartre is usually cited as begetter of the most complete existential answer, with Nausea (1938), but more than two decades earlier André Gide's The Vatican Cellars appalled critics with its supposedly amoral and nihilistic Romanian orphan hero, Lafcadio Wluiki, who, in the novel's most famous scene, throws a fellow passenger out of a train without motive. Superbly satisfying, mischief-making and funny, Gide's wonderfully controlled account of a young man who will commit any act to rid himself of the cliches of convention and family and his own past laid one of the first paths for other alienated heroes to follow.
Meursault, Albert Camus's "man without apparent conscience", is one. Meursault's first-person narrative in The Outsider is justly famous for its tragic tension between a man judged inhuman by society - he murders an Arab in momentary confusion, but is condemned more for failing to show grief at his mother's funeral - and one who, in his actions and utterances, is consistently honest. What is often overlooked is the rich, hot fabric of Camus's descriptions of the life of a profoundly sensual Frenchman, dominated by the sea and sun.
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