Parallels Within The Stranger (The Outsider) The Stranger by Albert Camus is the story of a sequence of events in a man's life that lead him to question his nature of the universe and its position in it. The book is written in two parts, and each part seems to largely reflect the actions that occur in the other. There are curious parallels between the two parts that seem to indicate the emotional state of Meursault, the protagonist, and his vision of the world. Meursault is a fairly mediocre individual who is notable more for his apathy and passive pessimism than anything else. He rarely speaks because he generally has nothing to say, and he does what is asked of him because he believes that resisting commands is more of a nuisance than it is worth. Meursault never did anything noteworthy or distinctive in his life – a fact that makes the events of the book all the more intriguing. Part I of The Stranger begins with Meursault's presence at his mother's funeral. It ends with Meursault killing a man on the beach in Algiers. Part II concerns Meursault's trial for that same murder, his final death sentence, and the mental anguish he experiences following this sentence. Here several curious parallels emerge, especially regarding Meursault's perception of the world. In the first part, Meursault spends the night next to his mother's coffin in a sort of pre-funeral wake. With him are some elderly people who were friends of his mother in the house where she lived at the time of her death. Meursault has the strange sensation that he can see all their faces very clearly, that he can observe every detail of their clothes and that they will be imprinted indelibly... in the middle of the paper... it made no essential difference in the end . The nurse at the funeral tells him, "if you walk too slowly, you'll get heatstroke, but if you walk too fast, the cool air in the church will give you shivers." As he kills the Arab, he thinks: "Whether I shoot or not shoot is irrelevant; the ending will be the same. And at the trial, Meursault says to the prosecutor: "I have lived my life like this and I have done x, but if instead I had done yoz, it wouldn't have mattered." And, in the end, Meursault turns out to be correct; he discovers that when death approaches, all men are equal, regardless of their age or their previous lives. Meursault sees death as a way of escape: you can't escape it, but you can escape into it, and it prepares to do so, little by little. Each parallel incident is just one more tortuous turn of the rope that will tie it up completely.