The Absurd

I am a sucker for stories within a story. I have always loved them! Sub-stories weaving in and out of the main story, the little events narrated by the characters that sometimes seemingly have no relevance whatsoever to the main story or sometimes adding depth and a different dimension to the characters, sometimes a deep life message molded into a small story that gets a thinking reader pondering. I guess this is one of the main reasons I love our epics, especially the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata is one awesome example of story telling that required tremendous talent and imagination. And the way the sub-stories in Mahabharata appear every now and then without EVER suggesting anything that might contradict other sub-stories or the main story itself is really amazing. And all the characters just fit in so perfectly that it is absolutely impossible to refute the belief that Mahabharata did in fact occur.

But, that is not what I set out to write here. I went off tangentially -- maybe I was too consumed by the sub-story concept that I started planting something else in the post I intended to make here! :D

Some stories just shock you. They surprise you with the chillness that life keeps throwing at you from time to time.

There is one such sub-story that keeps coming back to me all the time, not from the Mahabharata, but from one of my most favorite books, The Stranger, by Albert Camus. The story is so absurd that I don't know what to make of it -- it just is a chilling reminder of how seemingly mundane things can turn tragic.

Here is that story. It is in the first person of the protagonist who is doing time in prison.

Between my straw mattress and the bed planks, I had actually found an old scrap of newspaper, yellow and transparent, half-stuck to the canvas. On it was a news story, the first part of which was missing, but which must have taken place in Czechoslovakia. A man had left a Czech village to seek his fortune. Twenty-five years later, and now rich, he had returned with a wife and a child. His mother was running a hotel with his sister in the village where he'd been born. In order to surprise them, he had left his wife and child at another hotel and gone to see his mother, who didn't recognize him when he walked in. As a joke he'd had the idea of taking a room. He had shown off his money. During the night his mother and his sister had beaten him to death with a hammer in order to rob him and had thrown his body in the river. The next morning the wife had come to the hotel and, without knowing it, gave away the traveler's identity. The mother hanged herself. The sister threw herself down a well. I must have read that story a thousand times. On the one hand it wasn't very likely. On the other, it was perfectly natural. Anyway, I thought the traveler pretty much deserved what he got and that you should never play games.

Don't know what to say.