M. S. Y. CHOWDHURY1
1=Mst. Sabrina Yasmin Chowdhury, Assistant Professor, Department of Language, Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Email: sychowdhury@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
The study was conducted at the Department of Language, Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University, Dhaka, Bangladesh during September 2019 to March 2020 toexplain Meaursault, the protagonist of Albert Camus’s literary masterpiece ‘The Outsider, as an existentialist individual. He is a socially isolated and emotionally detached person who thinks life has no meaning. Sense of alienation in the society is the cause of his isolation. Neither he is a strong believer of any religious beliefs nor that much atheist to ignore all religious rules and regulation. He is not confined within any defined structure, whether social or religious. Meaursault rejects both religious and secular effort to find meaning because from his perspective, life is meaningless. His sense of life’s meaninglessness and other character’s persistent effort to impose structures of meaning demonstrates camus’s own philosophy of absurdism. In this study, at first I will discuss the major feature of existentialism and try to present ‘The outsider’ as an existentialist novel. Also I will show how an Existential being function in the society and how an existential being appears in society. After that this paper will seek to analyze Meaursault as an absurd hero.
Keywords: Existentialism, Absurdism, Isolation, Free will, Society, Meaninglessness and Meaursaul