The Stranger

Yay! I get to start posting my Concentration pieces! Okay, my theme was “literature’s reflection on the self”, which is just some bs for “I’m gonna do glorified fanart”. It did end up getting pretty complicated, though.

This first piece is based on Camus’ "The Stranger". It’s a collage of burned paper, coffee, and some colored pencil. I printed out Bible passages, Facebook chain messages, rom-com plot summaries, and ‘inspirational quotes’. Basically, these were things that I felt were alienating (and some apply to Meursault as well). My atheism makes me feel like an outsider. The things that I am expected to like (and do not) make me feel like an outsider. I feel downright alien when I cannot connect to a quote like “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm”, because I just see “If you’re not enthusiastic, you must not be achieving anything worth shit, and you’re stupid if you think just hard work gets you anywhere”. (Err, sorry Emerson fans.) I just can’t look at these things and feel what other people feel.

_{Copied from my tumblr post. Sorry, I usually try to write something different.}