Meursault

Meursault is the narrator and protagonist of Albert Camus's 1942 novel The Stranger (L'Etranger), a French settler clerk in Algeria whose flat, affectless narration opens with the death of his mother, an event he registers with startling emotional detachment rather than conventional grief. After killing an Arab man on a sun-blinded beach in an act that seems to arise from indifference as much as intent, Meursault is tried and condemned less for the killing itself than for his refusal, throughout the trial, to perform the social rituals of remorse and sentiment that the court demands of him. Meursault's radical honesty about his own indifference to socially expected emotion made him the defining literary embodiment of Camus's philosophy of the absurd, a man punished as much for refusing to lie about his feelings as for the crime he committed. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/