Word: mersault
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...book has several elements that recur in The Stranger: the sun-drenched Algerian setting, a restless clerk named Mersault whose mother dies, a restaurant keeper named Celeste. This Mersault, more open and spontaneous than in The Stranger, sees himself as a Sisyphus whose particular boulder is office work-"those eight hours a day other people can stand." He pours out his frustration to a rich man named Zagreus who has no legs. Zagreus tells him, "I'd accept even worse - blind, dumb, anything, as long as I feel in my belly that dark fire that is me, me alive...
...rest of the book Mersault pursues freedom fitfully. He goes alone to Prague but finds life unbearable away from the sun. Returning to North Africa he moves in with three docile young girls in a hilltop "house above the world." After a while he goes on to Lucienne, who is even more tractable and whose "mindless beauty" seems to him "divine...
Furthermore, the author's attempts to comment on the sexes would make Hemingway blush. "A man's beauty represents inner, functional truths: his face shows what he can do," Mersault muses. "What is that compared to the magnificent uselessness of a woman's face...
...rate Mersault concludes - like that other overweening youth Stephen Dedalus - that he was not made for love but "for the innocent and terrible dark god he would henceforth serve. To lick his life like barley sugar, to shape it, sharpen it - that was his whole passion." Instead he dies rather romantically of tuberculosis...
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