The Stranger Part 1 - Blog Response 1

The narrator in The Stranger has a curious way of reacting to the events in his life. He doesn't really care, and that's the way that existentialists live. They live day by day, and this is how the narrator lives his life. When he tells us that this mother has died, he doesn't seem effected by it. "Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure." He notices her death, but he doesn't seem to demonstrate emotion where others would weep over the death of their mother. It's strange how nothing effects him no matter how terrible his life may get. The reader can really tell that he doesn't care what happened in the past when he says, "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." He's almost as if he has no soul or heart, as if he is a shell of a man.