1. Overview of the project
1.1 Inspiration: the experience of life in high school
Camus is a writer I came across and loved in high school. I was drawn to him because his work perfectly recreates a sense of dissociation and disconnection from my life in high school. This sense of dissociation and disconnection was born out of the disconnect between the life I was pursuing and the world I was living in, and the absurdity of this disconnect was the beginning of the budding of existentialism in one being.
At the time of my birth, China was just gaining international recognition for its rapid industrial and technological development. This is why the saying "Learn Maths, Science and Chemistry and you can travel the world without fear" was popular at that time, expressing people's admiration for technology and science, and parents' ardent expectation for their children to become technically gifted. In this subtle discrimination, children with good grades were involuntarily sent to study science and technology, while studying art or arts was discriminated against. I was painfully fulfilling the responsibility of being a perfectly obedient top student until I awakened to it, even though I was acutely aware of my talent for art and creativity.
1.1 Inspiration: the experience of life in high school
Camus is a writer I came across and loved in high school. I was drawn to him because his work perfectly recreates a sense of dissociation and disconnection from my life in high school. This sense of dissociation and disconnection was born out of the disconnect between the life I was pursuing and the world I was living in, and the absurdity of this disconnect was the beginning of the budding of existentialism in one being.
At the time of my birth, China was just gaining international recognition for its rapid industrial and technological development. This is why the saying "Learn Maths, Science and Chemistry and you can travel the world without fear" was popular at that time, expressing people's admiration for technology and science, and parents' ardent expectation for their children to become technically gifted. In this subtle discrimination, children with good grades were involuntarily sent to study science and technology, while studying art or arts was discriminated against. I was painfully fulfilling the responsibility of being a perfectly obedient top student until I awakened to it, even though I was acutely aware of my talent for art and creativity.
Wanting to study art, I was forced to
be trapped in the reality of a superior science class.
Day in and day out, facing an environment without any like-minded friends and
still having to spend a lot of time and energy studying courses that ran
counter to my aspirations, was
a constant and silent torture for me. The boredom on the surface of my life and
the passion I had nowhere else to turn led to depression, and after talking to
my parents to no avail, I knew I had to complete my High School Entrance Examination
before I could really change my life and realize my ambitions - I had to get
through it in a more determined and positive way. So I was sober enough to keep
a daily record of my state and speak to myself so as not to become numbed by
the influence of others, and sober enough to continue to complete my school
work, in tandem with the fact that it was only later, in the long practice of
living, that I was introduced to existentialism and learned that the values I
was practising were both existential. This was the germ of existentialism in
me.
The core of existentialism is
precisely the same: our lives are full of absurdities and we are bound by
socially established ethics, morals and rules from the moment we are born. When
faced with these rules, some people are completely caught up in them without
realizing it; some are aware of the problem or have awakened to it, but choose
to obey or mentally escape in the face of the powerful institutional effects;
and then there are those who have awakened and choose to resist. In The Myth
of Sisyphus, Camus discusses two ways of resistance for this last category
of people, one is suicide ("There is only one really serious philosophical
problem, and that is suicide"), and the other is to transcend life, to
construct the idea of the self, to live soberly in the present and to actively
confront the absurdities of life.
Overview of the Novel
In The Outsiders, the protagonist, Meursault, is a man who has wandered outside the rules of society. His insensitivity to his mother's death, his lack of commitment to his lover Mary, his disinterest in a promotion and a raise, and his lack of resistance and defence to the murder trial all seem to confirm that he is a cold, unfeeling man with no sense of the social order.
Yet is this really the case? His love for himself and his life is never characterized by a need to conform to certain social norms or a love of the values that people seek in the world, although he is sometimes confused and numb, but we see this confusion and numbness because he also has an absolute truthful respect for those around him. This authenticity and lack of pretentiousness is a prerequisite for finding one's true self, and this authenticity, embodied in Camus's zero-degree approach to writing, broke the boundary between literature and real life and shook me deeply.
Overview of the Novel
In The Outsiders, the protagonist, Meursault, is a man who has wandered outside the rules of society. His insensitivity to his mother's death, his lack of commitment to his lover Mary, his disinterest in a promotion and a raise, and his lack of resistance and defence to the murder trial all seem to confirm that he is a cold, unfeeling man with no sense of the social order.
Yet is this really the case? His love for himself and his life is never characterized by a need to conform to certain social norms or a love of the values that people seek in the world, although he is sometimes confused and numb, but we see this confusion and numbness because he also has an absolute truthful respect for those around him. This authenticity and lack of pretentiousness is a prerequisite for finding one's true self, and this authenticity, embodied in Camus's zero-degree approach to writing, broke the boundary between literature and real life and shook me deeply.