Al’s Reviews > The Outsider > Status Update

...others, they too would one day be condemned to death. He as well, he too would be condemned to death. What did it matter if accused of murder he was executed for not crying at his mother’s funeral?

Why should the death of other people or a mother’s love matter so much? Why should I care about his god, the lives, the destinies we choose when one unique destiny had chosen me, and along with me millions and millions of privileged others who, like him, called themselves my brothers? Couldn’t he understand, could he really not understand? Everyone was privileged. There was no one who wasn’t privileged. All those...

...was that the condemned man had to hope for the guillotine to function properly. This is where I’d say the system is definitely faulty. And it’s true in a way. Yet I had to admit that this system held the secret of good management. Because, when all was said and done, the condemned man was obliged to collaborate morally: it was in his own best interest that everything went smoothly.

I understood what was flawed about the guillotine: no one had a chance, none whatsoever. When all was said and done, the death of the patient had been decided, once and for all. The matter was closed; it was an immutable mechanism, a foregone conclusion, not open for discussion. If by some extraordinary chance anything went wrong, they would simply start all over again. And so, logically, what was really annoying...

‘I’ve never met anyone with such a hardened soul as yours,’ he said softly. ‘Every criminal who has stood before me has always cried when faced with this symbol of suffering.’ I was about to reply that that was because they were criminals. But then I realized I was also a criminal; it was an idea I was having trouble coming to terms with.