Hallowed be thy name lyrics meaning trial#
When imprisoned he starts to contemplate his impending death by execution and only after the trial he faces his mortality and responsibility for his own life. Both are forced into a deep and forced introspection about life.
Life for both characters seems to be just a kind of an “absurd”, or an “illusion” according to the Maiden´s character, despite the fact that both seems to be satisfied with their imminent death. “When the priest comes to read me the last rites,I take a look through the bars at the last sights,Of a world that has gone very wrong for me.” The book also portraits the arbitrariness of justice and when the Priest asks him to repent and turn to Christianity in order to be “saved”, Meursault simply refuses the offer telling the Priest that “to pretend that he has found religion is pointless at the circumstances”. But then he is forced into a deep and forced introspection about his life, when he´s in prision and sentenced to death. On the second half the story he kills an Arab man as “his response to the sun’s physical effects upon him”, a mere occurrence that “happens to” Meursault. Wherever going to his mother´s funeral, swimming in the sea, or even sleeping with his girlfriend, Meursault is unaware of any meaning of his actions. In the story’s first half, Meursault is an unperceptive man, existing only via sensory experience. The 60´s media and literary critics labeled The Stranger as an existential novel but in fact it exposes Camus’s “theory of absurdism”. “Un homme du midi” to quote from the original in French, and the story is divided into two parts: Meursault’s first-person narrative view before and after the murder and his consequent imprisonment and sentence. The title character of Camus book is Meursault. I´ve found many parallels between both characters, because both seems to be on the same situation at some point of the book. Its called a “philosofical novel” because it explores various philosophical schools of thought, including absurdism, as well as determinism, nihilism, and naturalism.
The main character from the Maiden´s story, sentenced to death and waiting for his execution, goes into the same introspection that we may find on another character taken from a book written a long time ago.Īlbert Camus, a French/Algerian writer and philosopher has published his most famous novel The Stranger (L’Étranger in French) in 1942. I was listening to this old Iron Maiden hit from the 80´s when I started to pay attention to the lyrics, and it reminded a book which I read when I was a teenager.