"Death presents an ultimatum to the individual struggle to find meaning in life." The human experience is known to have one ultimate and final end and that is what human beings call death or, when they, as a conscious entity, stop existing and that experience stops. Camus uses the philosophical idea of the absurd to ask us as the reader to question whether there is any difference between the beginning and the end, just as you ceased to exist before you were born, you will cease to exist after you die. Everything in between is the result of inconsequential luck and it is this luck which gives way to the idea that there are no absolutes, on one a hand I could be born and on the other I couldn't of even been a thought on my parents mind. This is the same for death, and so consequences as a part of my choices in life become futile. We might as well take one road or the other. And so it is with a freedom to make choices, uninfluenced and unhindered by the burden of consequence that Camus and Meursault give an impassioned argument for the value of life in a world without religious meaning. The character of Meursault is Camus' representation of the absurd man. He is a pied-noir as Camus himself was, an Algerian, a man of the Mediterranean living in a society where tensions between the occupying French and the North African people were already high. In this sense he is already presented to us as a man detached and estranged from cultural norms. His character is sensuous and very in touch with the natural world, his values and his feelings outweigh the pressure one feels to act a certain way by society. Cosmic forces unbeknownst to us all effect Meursault very strongly showing how attuned he is to nature. This is evident in the funeral home at his mother's wake and subsequent funeral, ˜the whiteness of the room seemed even more dazzling than before.' The room is intensely visual to him, ˜it was painful to the eyes.
