deatharms Comparison of Death in Farewell to Arms and The Outsider (Th

Death in F atomic number 18well to fortification and The Outsider Hemingway once said that both stories...end in death. Certainly, each victuals persons story ends that way. The interrelationship of a narrative to a life, of the boundary situation of an ending, is of vital importance to the existence of these two fictional narratives, A Farewell to Arms and The Outsider. Death plays an important, one might say necessary, part in both novels, too Frederic Henry is, of course, in war and witness to death many times, maimed himself, and loses Catherine Meursaults story begins with his mothers death, he later kills an Arab, and then is himself tried and sentenced to death. In fact, the defining death-confrontations (Frederics loss of Catherine, Meursaults death sentence) transform the characters into narrators that is to say, the stories are told because of the confrontations with death. We must recognize that the fictive characters are attempting to provide or create an order or m eaning where it appears there is none. Or, there are pre-existing versions, meta-narratives, which prove inadequate or unsatisfying, and which must be replaced by the narrative each character produces. Meursault responds directly and violently to the priest who represents one such meta-narrative for Meursaults life. In the crescendo of the final scene of that novel when Meursault confronts the priest and finally re- leases the pent up anger and frustration repressed for so long, he does experience an epiphany As if this great outburst of anger had purged all of my ills, killed all my hopes, I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world. And finding it so much... ...s of The Myth of Sisyphus in The Outsider, and particularly to the discussion of the search for truth. In the Myth Camus goes through an inventory of accepted sources for truth and finds them all lacking first he tries religio n, but surprisingly it is too relative, for which god is god second he tries science, but finds that it offers not precision but metaphor (the world is like...) third he tries logic, but finds that paradoxically it leads to contradiction (for if all statements are professedly is true then no statements are true must be one of the true statements). He is left with the I - not the Cartesian I - but the Humean I (a bundle of perceptions) as the foundation for a meaning system. That changing, evolving, non-static I is at the heart of both of these works. Works CitedHemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York Simon, 1957.