![]() ![]() I'm not so sure that the court is impartial, but the wider point stands. It would not have "condemned a European to death for shooting an Arab… by suggesting that the court is impartial between Arab and Frenchman, the novel implicitly denies the colonial reality." A court in French Algeria simply would not work that way. In 1970, the Irish politician and academic Conor Cruise O'Brien wrote that the trial is "a myth, the myth of French Algeria". ![]() Yet although artifice is effective, it sits uncomfortably with reality. It doesn't seem so surprising that the French state focuses more on Meursault's behaviour at his mother's funeral than the dead man on the beach. ![]() This trial, meanwhile, is able to play out the way it does because the man is an Arab and so dehumanised. It adds to the impression that his trial by the French state is an intellectual problem as well as a human one. The lack of name is also a reflection of Meursault's detachment, his lack of curiosity, his coldness. It adds a layer of distancing and strangeness, a feeling that Meursault's fate is decided by something outside his usual realm of experience. Since we have so far looked at the book's qualities as a novel, the first thing to say is that it is an effective literary device. The French protagonist and his friends all have names: the man he kills, and his friends, do not. As far as The Outsider goes, the most obvious point is that Meursault kills an "Arab". ![]()
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