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Essay: Understand Meursault & Hamlet’s Battle With Society

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  • Subject area(s): Sample essays
  • Reading time: 7 minutes
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  • Published: 1 April 2019*
  • Last Modified: 23 July 2024
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  • Words: 1,858 (approx)
  • Number of pages: 8 (approx)
  • Tags: Hamlet essays

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It was Camus who said that the only way we can deal with a world that is unfree is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is itself an act of rebellion. Aside from time, freedom can be labeled the ultimate commodity in a world chock full of constraints. Sartre would say that our modern concept of freedom is murky at best. We spend our time fussing over petty measures of our liberty–the words we’re allowed to speak and write, the arms we can bear. These measures have undoubtedly profound effects on our existences, but we ultimately fail to even squabble over the true freedom a human can possess. What really is preventing us from being free is within our own mind; our real hindrance to freedom is our quasi-intentional disownment of it as a means of self-protection—our lives in mauvaise foi, or “bad faith”. Meursault, in Albert Camus’s The Stranger, is perceived by some as an exemplarity of the concept of bad faith, however,  Meursault’s absolute rejection of social conventions means he embodies the opposite and is absolutely free. Hamlet, of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, sharply contrasts the character of Meursault in that he is deeply emotional and a foil to Meursault's passivity. However, Hamlet’s refusal to deceive himself means he is also the epitome of authenticity. The plights of these men divulge that to live with authenticity is to revel in the absurdity of this nonsensical and indifferent universe and accept the certainties of death and the uncertainties of all else.

The dispositional variances of Meursault and Hamlet reveal that living without bad faith is more than a personality attribute. To live in bad faith is to fall victim to the forces of society and deceive yourself into disowning your freedom. You tell yourself that your way of life is not a choice to avoid the realization that you may not be living up to your fullest potential. To live without bad faith is to live with authenticity. It is evident that Hamlet lives in this manner by his ownership of his emotions and innate freedoms. When Hamlet sees his father's ghost, he follows it despite others persuading him not to. He wishes to speak to his father:  “Speak! I’ll go no further!”. He is doing what he wants, thus living authentically. Hamlet’s intense rage that he feels for his uncle truly shakes him to his core and drives him to hysteria. This is expressed by his intense language:“O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!”. Hamlet is allowing himself to be angry and emotional, to the point that even his best friend Horatio can’t make sense of Hamlets “wild and whirling words”.  When Hamlet is propelled further into despair and resentment after watching a play, he is aware that shouting curses instead of taking action are foolish. This displays self-awareness, further revealing authenticity. Hamlet knows that he will not succeed by deceiving himself, so he breaks the mold of a human living in bad faith. Where Hamlet is emotional, brooding, and deeply thoughtful, Meursault embodies the opposite through his passivity, apathy, and lack of regard for anything and anyone. While the death of Hamlet’s father plunges Hamlet into a deep grief,  Meursault's response to his mother's death that is the opening of The Stranger is as emotionless as Hamlet’s is emotional.  “Maman died today, Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.” Meursault is passive and expresses no emotion at the loss of his mother.   Relationships in families may greatly and have the utmost effect on a reaction to loss, but Meursault's emotionless reaction can surely be considered atypically indifferent and a sharp contrast to Hamlet's.  Although the men respond very differently, both responses reveal a life that is not in bad faith. Just like Hamlet, Meursault accepts how he feels- how he feels just happens to be not very emotional. Someone living in bad faith would fall prey to society and pretend to be sad.  Meursault's numb indifference  and passivity are also exemplified by his lack of feeling when he hears Raymond abusing his girlfriend: “There were some thuds and the woman screamed, but in such a terrifying way that the landing immediately filled with people.” Meursault's expresses no feeling over this trauma,  and if he fit the mold of bad faith, he would still be one of the people filling the landing. The contrasts between the dispositions of Meursault and Hamlet imply that to live in good faith goes deeper than the tangible way they interact with their worlds.

Meursault and Hamlet have the power to live authentically because they share an apathy for societal conventions.  Meursault is the ultimate stranger to society whose disregard for societal norms is blatantly clear from the first lines of the novel. An example of his rejection and disregard for intense societal forces is his lack of motivation to marry. Society is economically and socially built on monogamous marriage, and Meursault's lack of care is the ultimate societal rejection. When Marie asks if he will marry him, he says he doesn’t mind, that “if she was keen on it, we’d get married.” Meursault's rejection of societal conventions is also seen when he shoots the Arab on the beach. When considering the shot, it crosses his mind that “one might fire, or not fire – and it would come to absolutely the same thing.” Meursault’s philosophy that it doesn’t matter if he shoots does not  fit into a society that opposes murder as a moral wrong. Our collective values, our shared conceptions, the idea that it is wrong to kill, that it is right to marry, is man’s attempt to order the world, to assign meaning. To live in bad faith is to pretend that these values are synonymous with your own. Like Meursault, Hamlet too does not simply accept the values of others.  Hamlet’s rejection of societal conventions is exemplified by his aforementioned plight into madness and acceptance of his feelings in a society that values sanity and togetherness.  Hamlet expresses rage with “towering passion”, and later states “I forgot myself”. Hamlet’s allowance of unbridled emotional articulation shows that he cares more to express his authentic emotions than to conform to the norms that exist. Hamlet wears black following his Father’s death for longer than normal, and is even chided by Claudius.  Hamlet is choosing to feel and act on his emotions instead of following what people usually do; he’s creating values of his own instead of accepting those of others. This society was one that thought the order of the Universe to be unchangeable. The Elizabethans believed in order of the universe and that the world was ordered in a hierarchy- from God down to dust everyone had  a particular position and role. A man was to make the right choice based on knowledge of this ordered universe. When the ghost tells Hamlet to avenge the “foul and most unnatural murder”, he is telling Hamlet to restore the order of the Universe, because the murder was unnatural and thus working against this order. Hamlet does wish to avenge his father’s death, but his reasoning and thought process reveals that he is choosing to follow his own values and emotions rather than the value of restoring order. He thoughtfully considers how to ensure the identity of the perpetrator because he wants his revenge to be authentic. He does not simply accept that he should seek revenge to restore order, revealing he is dubious of society's notion of such.  This is indicative of Hamlet’s rejection of societal conventions. Furthermore, it is this very skepticism of humanity’s urge to assert understanding and order over the universe that reveals how Meursault and Hamlet can live according to values that belong to only themselves.

To be able to reject conventions and live with authenticity and without bad faith is to give credence to the sheer complexity of an incomprehensible universe in which life and death are our only certainties: not “to be or not to be”, but to let be. The answer to Hamlet's famous quandary of “To be, or not to be?” can’t be put into this dichotomy: “We defy augury.” he says,  “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since man, of aught he leaves, knows aught, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.” To defy augury is to accept that we cannot foresee and thus control the future, thus Hamlet’s utterance that there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow seeps in irony as he asserts that our attempts to understand the universe are futile and living authentically is enabled by the understanding that we cannot understand. If there is a destiny in the fall of a sparrow, it isn’t something we can fully understand.  Whether you believe in providence or in fortune, to live with authenticity is to refuse that you can predict the future and accept the certitude of life and death. As Meursault nears his execution he undergoes this very realization as he judges the priest speaking to him: “And yet none of his certainties was worth one strand of a woman’s hair. Living as he did, like a corpse, he couldn’t even be sure of being alive. It might look as if my hands were empty. Actually, I was sure of myself, sure about everything, far surer than he; sure of my present life and of the death that was coming. That, no doubt, was all I had; but at least that certainty was something I could get my teeth into—just as it had got its teeth into me.”  He refers to the certainties of the priest as worthless because they are founded on meaningless conventions and a notion of control of the universe. His proximity to death has allowed him to accept it as inevitable and he finds companionship with the universe is indifferent and utterly disconnected from society: “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.” Meursault’s authenticity is enabled by this acceptance of indifference. Knowing that the habits and laws of society are constructed and that the universe isn’t heedful to them enables one to live without bad faith because they don’t feel the need to adopt societal values as their own and thus disown their freedom and act inauthentically. Hamlet and Meursault can live lives that are not in bad faith — remaining triumphantly true to themselves — because they give credence to the unintelligible beauty of the universe and choose to let it be.

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