In his works, Caligula and L'Etranger, Albert Camus created two characters. Caligula and Meursault, who rejected the possibility of their mortality. They considered themselves immortal. In accordance with Freud's argument in “Our Attitude Towards Death,” their unconscious denied their death.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
AbbecasisJ. L. (1997, September). Camus's Pulp Fiction. Modern Language Notes, 112, 625–640.
2.
BonnerK. (2011). The illness of hope, the cure of truth and the difference of principle: A reflexive analysis of Antigone's and Meursault's confrontations with death. In ConnollyT. (Ed.), Spectacular death: Interdisciplinary perspectives on mortality and (un)representability (pp. 43–56). Bristol, UK: Intellect.
3.
Brady-PapidopoulouV. (1980). Camus' Meursault: A ‘nocturnal’ being in a ‘diurnal’ world. Orbis Litterarum, 35(1), 74–82.
4.
BrombertV. (2011, Summer). Albert Camus, the endless defeatRaritan, 31(1), 24–39.
5.
CamusA. (1955). “Avant-propos” to L'Étranger, BréeG. and LynesC.Jr. (Eds.). New York, NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
6.
CamusA. (1942, 1988). The Stranger; trans. from the French by Matthew Ward. New YorkNY: Knopf, 2000. I have used this work for the English translations. Cited in parentheses in this article as Ward.
7.
CamusA. (1944, 1958). Caligula and three other plays.GilbertS. (Trans.). New York, NY: Knopf.
8.
ConroyW. T.Jr. (1980). Meursault's Repression: Maman and Murder. College Literature, 7(1), 40–46.
9.
CrowleyM. (2007). Camus and social justice. In HughesE. J. (Ed.), Cambridge companion to Camus (pp. 93–105). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
10.
DunwoodieP. (2007). From Noces to L'Etranger. In HughesE. J. (Ed.), Cambridge companion to Camus (pp. 156–62). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
11.
FletcherJ. (1970). Interpreting L'Etranger. French Review, 43(1), 158–167.
12.
FreudS. (1915). Our attitude towards death. Standard Edition (Vol. 14; pp. 289–300). London, UK: Hogarth Press.
13.
GehaR.Jr. (1967, Winter). Albert Camus: Another will for deathPsychoanalytic Review, 54(4), 662–678.
MaddenD. (1970). The postman always rings twice and Albert Camus's The stranger. Papers on Language and Literature, 6, 407–419.
19.
MakariG. (1988). The last four shots: Problems of intention and Camus' The Stranger. American Imago, 45(4), 359–374.
20.
MorisiE. C. (2011). Literature in Extremis: The poetics and ethics of capital punishment in the world of Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, and Albert Camus. Ph.D. dissertation. Princeton University.
21.
OhayonS. (1983). Camus' The stranger: The sun metaphor and patricidal conflict. American Imago, 40(2), 189–205.
22.
RazinskyL. (2010). Driving death away: Death and Freud's theory of the death drive. Psychoanalytic Review, 97(3), 393–424.