No Sympathy

          I don't think marrying someone solely for their money is ever going to end well but I guess that's just my opinion. When we discovered that the only reason he traveled to the West Indies was to secure the wealth of a single woman it really kinda hurt my sympathy for Rochester. My view of the situation went from the story a man that was getting picked on by the people of this community during his honeymoon to the story of a man getting what he deserved.
          Now there was a moment during the second part where he goes from just being with her for the money to trying to connect with Antoinette. She's explaining to him everything that she had to go through before they met and its nice because we see Rochester try to comfort her (even if it was with a strange song). This little bit of compassion between the characters is immediately ruined when Rochester has an affair that was completely uncalled for. When you get drugged the first thing you do shouldn't be to run off with the nearest maid. Also I'm gonna go out on a limb  here and say that drugging your man is on the Cosmopolitan's Top 100 sex tips.
          At this point my feelings for these two is like being on a roller coaster, it has its ups and downs and by the end of the whole ordeal I'm left confused and looking up asking "What just happened?". The only person character that comes to mind that wasn't driving me crazy by the end of the novel was Christophine who tried to split Antoinette's inheritance 50/50 and tried to convince Antoinette that drugs aren't good (stay in school). I enjoyed this novel as a whole because using two narrators really lets us get a different perspective that would've been entirely different books on their own. Although there was one thing that I didn't like but can't change, which was the ending. Antoinette was doing alright on her own just to have everything flipped upside down by a gold-digging British man and nothing seems to really happen to him at the end of all this. I don't think its fair but I guess its the feeling of injustice that I had which made this novel so compelling.

The man who wasn't there

           The Man Who Wasn't There is the story of a barber named Ed Crane who tries to blackmail his wife's employer in order to finance a new business venture, dry cleaning. Since Ed is just a barber and has no prior experience in extortion, the plan goes horribly wrong and he has to get out of more trouble as the movie goes on. As far as movies go, I really enjoyed The Man Who Wasn't There and really recommend it to people whether or not they've read The Stranger.  The Coen brothers wrote this film in a way which  some points mirror those of The Stranger, while the plot as a whole is totally different. It's strange, but think about it like the story of Little Red Hood and the movie Hoodwinked. In both versions I felt that the movie adaptations seemed to be parodying the its written version and they were willing to take "artistic liberties". The biggest difference however is that looking back at both movies, one is about a barber and the other is flaming garbage.
            I'm not gonna lie, when I saw Ed on-screen I thought he was creepy. His deep monotonous voice followed by the dead look on his face while he was cutting hair made me think he was going to secretly be part of the mafia. Strangely I was wrong and he was telling the truth when he tells the audience that all he does is cut hair. The way he responds to people around him is very Meursault-like being he doesn't really show emotion. I think this was really apparent when there's a "dialogue" between him and a the lawyer he's hired when they meet at a diner. I put quotations around dialogue because in the entire scene, Ed might've said about 10 words. With everything that's going on in the movie so far Ed should have a lot more to say to his lawyer than "Yes" and "No, I'm not hungry". From what we read in The Stranger, I think I could replace Ed with Meursault and have very similar actions in their plots occur because they very much alike.
           I think the Coen brothers did a great job telling such a unique story. Thee thing that I really liked about the film is that the Coen brothers wrote it in a way that I felt as if it was going to end every time it faded to black. Instead however, they took what seemed to be the end of the movie and suddenly opened it up so the plot could continue.  [SPOILER ALERT] The one that I honestly didn't see coming was at the end when he was waiting in the prison. He somehow manages to walk outside and see a spaceship flying overhead and instead of getting onboard, he just looks up and walks back inside like it didn't happen. [SPOILER END] It's the crazy twists that made me laugh and overall I thought it was just an enjoyable movie.

Understanding Meursault

          Meursault is a man that committed a crime but I believe he was punished for the wrong reasons. He admitted to killing the Arab and in his story gave an honest reason for why he went through with the act and was laughed at because they thought it was ridiculous. Instead, the jury believed that he had some built up psychological issues, the claims of which were backed  by him not crying  at his mother's funeral. I feel that people were too quick to judge Meursault as a sociopath and the reasons that they gave just weren't fair.
          First off, during his mother's funeral he didn't really express any feelings towards his mothers passing and as readers we get the passenger seat on Meursault's view of things. I think it's strange that he didn't cry because if I lost someone who was that close to me I would be a mess, but the thing is I'm not Meursault. He's dealing with his loss by drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette and I think that is just fine. He's not crying his eyes out because he doesn't care but more because he knows it won't bring her back. The one thing that I sympathized with the most was him not wanting to see his mother in the open casket. It's hard to really grasp that you'll never see someone again, so he probably didn't want that last image of her to be one in a casket.
            I think Camus was trying to make Meursault a coin on its edge, neither heads nor tails.  Loss is handled differently by everyone and I think when people see the Meursault coin on its side, they want to call it for being on a side that it's not. He presents himself as neutral/indifferent and the people around him are supposed to decide which extreme he's leaning towards. In this case he's not rolling around crying and at the same time him attending showing that he cares.  When you take him at face value, he's just a guy that doesn't express his feelings outwards. For example, he doesn't really react to Marie's marriage proposal because he feels that  it won't change their relationship at all. Again, I think he's just a coin sitting on its side waiting for the people around him to tell him whether he's heads or tails.