Each individual has distinguishing characteristics that can either separate them from the majority or can place them in the majority. What may seem different may actually be very common with another. Being human in society one must adapt to social norms or be look at as an outcast. Although an induvial may try to adapt to social norms they will always be targeted for not being born normal. In the book The Stranger by Albert Camus and film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser by Werner Herzog, the main characters Meursault and Kasper Hauser show how individuals can be detached from the world or reality in different stories but have a similarity where they challenge society norms and seen as an outcast. The novel and film display the contrast on how …show more content…
He lacks sympathetic emotions that normal people would show in events. For example: He simply does not care that his mother is dead, or that Marie loves him. He shows no grief at his mother’s funeral, and worries more about the heat at the funeral. He's not able to adjust to his surroundings and, more importantly, he's not aware of his own motivations. Meursault is passive, dispassionate, ignorant of himself, and unable to connect with or even acknowledge other people. But all of these change throughout the ordeal that Meursault suffers. Meursault cannot understand people but yet, he observes them carefully, he says, "not one detail of their faces or clothes escape" him, but it is still "hard for him to believe they really exist." In comparison the main character Kaspar from The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is unaware with his surroundings but gradually starts to understand. Kaspar was released from the confines of his underground prison allowing him to see for the first time the the world he was never given. Because of his past and being secluded from the world, now entering this world society's attempt to tame him shows that man, not nature, is the trouble. Kaspar Hauser had to be taught how to speak, how to act, and how to …show more content…
The past to an individual can be the cause of their bondage or can be a next step to their freedom. Meursault and Kaspar are examples of individuals being imprisoned both physically and mentally but their present determines their freedom, rather than their past. Meursult reality comes to him while he's alone in his cell, the process was a gradual one and that, in order to get to this epiphany, he had to suffer. He wants to be free from hope because the idea of having hope meant that there was some disconnection between who he should be and who he actually was. Although Meursault wants to fit in he is still a man that threatens society’s moral standards. He wants to just blend perfectly into his environment and no longer have to bear the burden of proving to the rest of the world he existed in their terms. Meursault said "I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate" (123). By suffering final judgment from the world, he realizes that he is no longer bound to conform to their standards. He can finally exist in his own realm and behave not the way he should "hope" to attain, but simply the way he wanted to. With his execution he doesn't have to stay up all night waiting for the dawn" when the world will come in and take him because he now understands that they can only free him: no one has the right to steal his life. Meursault