Through chapter 1, Meursault goes to his mother's funeral, where he keeps vigil over night with the other elderly people who lived in the home with his mother. In the morning, he goes with them to the village about 2 kilometers away for the service and burial. Once his mother is buried, Meursault returns home to Algiers and falls asleep. In chapter 2, he wakes up on the following Saturday and decides to go swimming where he meets up with an old acquaintance whom he decides to take on a date and spend the night with. The next day after she leaves, Meursault is stuck in his apartment spending a bitter Sunday alone, watching the activity of the street from his balcony.
Throughout both chapters, Meursault is constantly taking notice of everything that is happening around him except for his mother being dead, unless that fact happens to slip in with some other detail of the moment. Much of the time, he has a bitter tone as if this is something that he considers a complete waste of his time that he is only going through so that he can appear as a mostly normal person. Meursault's lack of attachment to anything emotional that is going on is able to convey a great message of what the idea of existentialism means to the author. Camus creates this protagonist so that he is able to show what it is like for a person to live with existential beliefs and how they think and feel through their life with its tragedies and joys, which end up not being much different from one another.
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