In the experimental novel The Stranger by Albert Camus, he explores the concept of existentialism and the idea that humans are born into nothingness and descend into nothingness after death. The novel is set in the French colony of Algiers where French-Algerian worker settlers live in an urban setting where the simple pleasures of life are of the utmost importance in the lives of working class people like the novel's protagonist Meursault. What is fascinating about this novel is that it opens with a scene of perpetual unhappiness for him through the death of his mother although he seems to express the opposite. The reader perceives this nonchalance as a lack of care. Maman's death and its impact on Meursault appear both at the very beginning and at the very end of the two-part novel, suggesting a cyclical pattern in the structure. This cyclical pattern does not suggest a change in Meursault's moral beliefs but rather that he registers the systems and beliefs of society and gives meaning to his own life despite the fact that he ultimately dies. Camus uses Maman's funeral to characterize both Meursault and the society and customs created by the society in which Meursault lives in order to contrast the two while revealing how while society changes, Meursault does not. On the contrary, Mom's funeral takes on an unprecedented importance in Meursault's life and allows him to see that nothing means anything in his insignificant world at the moment of her death. He finds peace there.Camus begins the beginning of his novel by evoking the death of the narrator's mother in the first person. Meursault, the protagonist and narrator of the novel, begins by contemplating the day of his mother's death and is unable to understand...... middle of paper ...... Mom's funeral and the impact of the death of mother in Meursault. In the first chapter, Meursault is disconnected from the world around him; he only responds to established social customs and is aware of why they must be followed, but he does not understand why this is the case. In the final chapter, the inevitable arrival of Meursault's own death makes him realize that the life he lived meant nothing because things would ultimately be the same despite the choices he made. This acceptance is achieved because Meursault was guided through death. Thus, Maman's funeral connects Meursault and Maman as two individuals who accept their truth full of despair but demonstrate the will to live again because they carry this acceptance with them. Works Citedamus, Albert and Matthew Ward. The Stranger. New York: Vintage International, 1989. Print.