The Outsider

Meursault isn't like your average character, someone who isn't remotely bent to the whims of the society but is simply vaguely aware of them. Until the very end i.e., during the trails and during the lonely musings does he come to acknowledge their presence. He always lived according to what came to him. You would probably call him cold hearted. I don't have a definate classification for him. He is so adamantly alive, yes, that's what he is. He is so fully aware of his existance, of his desires. How can one classify such as him cold?

His ignorance or lack of interest in what the society regards as necessary could be called as his innocence, is it this that helped him smile on his final hour and understand the glory of death?

He is smart, that much is evident. His convictions cannot be shaken, like when he says he can't fake interest in something he has none, like when he refuses to turn to the chaplain even during the his last hours because he cannot recognise the existence of God, never did and now he simply cannot see why he should.

I love the last peice of 'The outsider'
"I must have had a longish sleep, for, when I woke, the stars were shining down on my face. Sounds of the countryside came faintly in, and the cool night air, veined with smells’ of earth and salt, fanned my cheeks. The marvelous peace of the sleepbound summer night flooded through me like a tide. Then, just on the edge of daybreak, I heard a steamer’s siren. People were starting on a voyage to a world which had ceased to concern me forever. Almost for the first time in many months I thought of my mother. And now, it seemed to me, I understood why at her life’s end she had taken on a “fiancé”; why she’d played at making a fresh start. There, too, in that Home where lives were flickering out, the dusk came as a mournful solace. With death so near, Mother must have felt like someone on the brink of freedom, ready to start life all over again. No one, no one in the world had any right to weep for her. And I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration."