That One Escalator (Sasha)

While Rochester spends much of his time accusing or suspecting others of insanity, it is actually he who acts insane throughout the book. While he has clearly lost it completely but he end of Part II, Rochester actually begins to go mad much earlier in the book, perhaps as a result of his severe illness. Rochester’s mistrust of the West Indies develops rapidly into severe paranoia, and possible hallucinations.  Rochester does not quite understand the West Indies, which is understandable for someone who has just arrived there, and does not quite trust them either, which is also understandable for someone who immediately got a fever so bad he was confined for 3 weeks. However, this initial mistrust and understanding opens up an avenue for Rochester to to manifest all of his worst character tendencies, culminating in his state-endorsed kidnapping and false imprisonment of his wife.  Rochester’s mistrust begins to grow increasingly paranoid, believing that people are hid...

         Albert Camus’ The Stranger is, along with its other philosophical explorations, an exploration of the concept of neutrality, and what neutrality means. Meursault is portrayed as a character who does his utmost to preserve his “neutrality” in the face of all the actions and words of the other characters in the story, especially Salamano and Raymond. Camus’, in what is not much of a surprise, given his active participation in the French Resistance, seems to side with the view that neutrality in the face of evil is itself evil. This view is most evident through the first half of the book, while Meursault is a free man.  In the second half, the message on neutrality changes slightly. Not only will it make one complicit and ultimately directly responsible for evil, it will also fail to save oneself. Meursault is sentenced to death by guillotine, the standard method of execution in France until the abolition of the death penalty in 1981 (the other ...