In the final two chapters of “The Stranger” Meursalt starts becoming aware of what people really think about him. He starts showing some emotions and seems to have matured while in prison. The trail continues, but it’s a weird trail and Meursalt doesn’t really feel a part of it. The prosecutor connects the upcoming case of a son killing his father with ‘the stranger’ as “killing” his mother. Attitude towards other people is taken into account more than the actual killing of the Arab. Later he gets the verdict that his head will be cut off in a guillotine.
As the clock is ticking, so are the seconds remaining in Meusault’s life. That little hope he has for the appeal to succeed and to be a ‘free-man’ again is keeping him alive. While behind bars, he wonders how to escape, how to stop the guillotine, and even comes up with his own idea of what he would do to the inmates who face death penalty ahead of them. He thinks that he would give them a ‘dog’s chance’ that the killing pill would work nine out of ten times, but they would still have a chance. He views the justice system and the whole process as a ‘machinery’ and when the priest comes to talk to him about God it doesn’t interest him and feels like the priest is a part of machinery also.
He tries to convince that life is not worth living and at the end of the day we all die, it’s just a matter of time. In fact he is preparing himself mentally before the due date comes. Every night he waits for the d-day to come and remembers his happy moments in his life, but he feels that the society which chose the way he was going to die would view his whole life by the final chapter – the killing of the Arab. ‘Because the world is indifferent towards me, I will be indifferent towards the world’ Meursault keeps thinking. The novel ends with Meursault last wish being a big crowd cheering when he was going to be executed, so Albert Camus gives us food for thought whether the process did go through or not!
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