deatharms Comparison of Death in Farewell to Arms and The Outsider (Th

end in Farewell to Arms and The Outsider Hemingway once said that any stories...end in remnant. Certainly, each living persons story ends that way. The interrelationship of a annals to a life, of the boundary situation of an ending, is of vital importance to the existence of these cardinal fictional narratives, A Farewell to Arms and The Outsider. Death plays an important, one superpower say necessary, part in both myths, to a fault Frederic Henry is, of course, in war and witness to death many times, wounded himself, and loses Catherine Meursaults story begins with his mothers death, he later kills an Arab, and then is himself tried and sentenced to death. In fact, the defining death-confrontations (Frederics loss of Catherine, Meursaults death sentence) transform the characters into narrators that is to say, the stories are told because of the confrontations with death. We must recognize that the fictive characters are attempting to deliver the goods or create an order o r meaning where it appears in that location is none. Or, there are pre-existing versions, meta-narratives, which prove inadequate or unsatisfying, and which must be replaced by the narrative each character produces. Meursault responds directly and violently to the priest who represents one such meta-narrative for Meursaults life. In the crescendo of the final scene of that novel when Meursault confronts the priest and finally re- leases the pent up rage and frustration subdue for so long, he does experience an epiphany As if this great outburst of anger had purged all of my ills, killed all my hopes, I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the friendly indifference of the world. And finding it so much... ...s of The Myth of Sisyphus in The Outsider, and particularly to the backchat of the search for honor. In the Myth Camus goes through an inventory of accepted sources for truth and finds them all lacking first he tries religion, but surprisingly it is too relative, for which god is god second he tries science, but finds that it offers not precision but metaphor (the world is like...) third he tries logic, but finds that paradoxically it leads to contradiction (for if all statements are true is true then no statements are true must be one of the true statements). He is left with the I - not the Cartesian I - but the Humean I (a bundle of perceptions) as the foundation for a meaning system. That changing, evolving, non-static I is at the heart of both of these works. Works CitedHemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York Simon, 1957.