Third Class

The third class of existentialism was amazing! In the beginning, our teacher didn't even give an introduction to the new students necessarily it was just them starting with their PowerPoint. They began with a skit discussing how a normal person might react to emotional stimuli and how the main character from the stranger would respond which demonstrated just how emotionally detached he was throughout. We got into some great discussion concerning this character as to why we - and the characters in the book around him - find him so strange. Many of us tried to prescribe different mental conditions to him like psychopathy or autism but the one idea I heard that I really enjoyed was that he was essentially just a caricature of a man created by Camus that simply does not fit into our emotional society as a way to show us how strange that person would be to us and I think to make us question why we care so much about people having emotions and feeling remorse. Later on in the story, Mersault kills a man on the beach but after shooting him once, he pauses and then shoots him four more times. To me, this said that maybe he was feeling something for the first time - the rush of killing another man was his first feeling. The students guiding the class asked if we thought he was a good man or a bad man despite his actions. My immediate response was well he did murder a person so I'm pretty sure he's bad. Some people ridiculed my response a bit by saying things like is that a litmus response for morality and I essentially made a joke out of it by mimicking an officer on scene talking to Mersault saying, "did you kill a person in the last 24 hours? Yes? Hmm, I'm not sure if you're a bad guy." The consensus that the class seemed to come to, however, is that since Mersault is incapable of feeling the weight of morality in the situation, or any situation for that matter, that he is not on the spectrum of good or bad but rather on a whole other wavelength entirely - right and wrong does not really apply to him as he is apathetic towards or simply does not understand morality. Once the first group finished and the second group was up the energy in the room was definitely a bit lower but I think it was just because we were starting to get tired - something to watch out for in our presentation as we will go second next week. The second group treaded much of the same ground as the material was the same it was just the setting in the book that changed. The part I liked was when we discussed how Mersault lashed out at the pries and why he may have done that. The answer I resonated with most is that his whole life Mersault had been told by everyone around him that he needed to be a certain way that he simply was not and when the priest was telling him he needed God for redemption it was the culmination of that pent up aggression from not fitting in in his society spilling out for the first time. It was a very interesting class and I am a lot less worried about how our presentation will go after seeing how well the first two went.

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