The Sweet Escape

Death is certainly a difficult subject. But it’s not necessarily a hard thing for the person who actually died. Rather, that person’s loved ones are the sorry people who grieve. But for what? Why do people get all worked up over something that actually frees a person from the confines of this world? Death is, after all, liberating. Meursault, in Albert Camus’s The Stranger, out of all the people who knew his mother, is the only one who doesn’t grieve with her death. He is quite nonchalant in the way he expresses seeing his dead mother’s funeral. Meursault is not without emotion, however. The reader sees him refer to Mme. Meursault as Maman, an affectionate term for one he loved deeply. But Meursault does not mourn for he understands that his mother was suffering, a free mind caged in an old body. He describes her retirement home as oppressive, and finds the old folk’s talk to be dull. Meursault can easily see how his mother’s death was one of the best, most freeing things that could’ve happened to her. Similarly, in “A Night-Piece on Death” by Thomas Parnell, Parnell explores death’s effect on the deceased and on the loved ones of that individual. He arrives to the conclusion that grieving for the deceased is pointless. Parnell understands that, “Death’s but a path that must be trod/ If men would ever pass to God,” (Parnell lines 70-71). He describes life as a prison that is only escaped through death. Both Parnell and Meursault view death as a scapegoat from a world of suffering, something that should certainly not be mourned.