Freedom and death in The Stranger (The Stranger)In The Stranger (The Stranger), as in all the works of Camus , Camus's views on freedom and death – one dependent on the other – are major themes. For Camus, freedom is born in the awareness of one's own life, of the life of each moment, of an intense and glorious life which needs no redemption, no regrets, no tears. Death is unjustifiable, absurd; it is only a reintegration into the cosmos for a “free” man. Until a person achieves this consciousness, life, like death, is absurd and, in fact, generically, life remains absurd, even though each individual's life may be valuable and meaningful to him or her. In a sense, The Stranger is a parable of Camus's philosophy, emphasizing what is necessary for freedom. Meursault, hero of The Stranger, is not a character that one could encounter in reality in this respect; Meursault only achieves the awakening of conscience, so essential to the freedom and life of Camus's philosophy, at the very end of the book, and yet he lived his entire life according to the morality of Camus's philosophy. Camus. His equivalent in Christian philosophy would be an irreligious person whose homeland has never encountered Christianity and who, after having it explained to him by a missionary, realizes that he has never sinned. What is the morality, the qualities necessary for freedom, that Meursault demonstrated? First, the dominant trait of his character is his passion for absolute truth. If in Meursault this takes the form of a truth of being and feeling, it is still the truth necessary for the conquest of oneself or of the world. This passion is so deep that it persists even though denying it could save his life. Second, and not unrelated to the first, is Meursault's acceptance of nature as it is and nothing more, his rejection of the supernatural, including any god. In fact, the “rejection” of God is only accurate later, when he is challenged to accept the concept; Meursault simply never considered God and religion worth pursuing. Naturalness makes sense; the supernatural does not. It follows that Meursault's death is also what it is naturally; the end of life, the cessation, and that's it. Third, and this is logical, Meursault lives entirely in the present. The past is past and dwelling on it, regardless of one's mood, is just a waste of the present. As for the future, the ultimate future is death; sacrificing the present for the future is equivalent to sacrificing life for death.