Albert Camus, in Kurt Vonnegut's style

1

So, my AP English Literature and Composition teacher gave me this assignment. That assignment is to take a passage from a book we’ve read for class this year and rewrite it in Kurt Vonnegut’s style, ala Slaughterhouse-Five. This is an interesting assignment. I had some trouble deciding which book to desecrate, but now I’m sitting down and doing it. I’ve chosen Albert Camus’s The Stranger, an existentialist piece of literature written in France.

It turns out that France is the country which Germany invaded when it instigated World War I. It would instigate another war twenty-six years later, under the command of Adolf Hitler. Hitler’s birthday is five days before mine. Adolf Hitler developed most of his ideas while fighting in World War I, largely because he had nothing else to do. He was a decent artist. When he applied to an art school, he wasn’t accepted, though. Since he wasn’t accepted into that art school, about 11 million people were systematically killed under a plan of mass genocide later called “The Holocaust” by many famous historians. This is as it is written at Wikipedia.com.

So it goes.

2

Meursault’s trial came pretty quickly. Though to him it seemed otherwise, it was also finished pretty quickly. His was pretty much a dead cause. So it goes.

So he spent the rest of his days reading and rereading a newspaper clipping. He found it in his cell. It was about a Czechoslovakian. He left home and made a fortune. When he returned home, he wanted to surprise his family. The Czech rented a room at his mother’s hotel, showing off all his money. His mother robbed him in the middle of the night and beat him to death. When she learned he was her son, she hung herself. When the man’s sister heard about this, she threw herself off a cliff. So it goes.

The prison guards kept insisting that he see the chaplain. Every time he refused, it made them more persistent about his seeing the chaplain. He was quite content not seeing the chaplain. Loneliness was good company. It gave him time to contemplate. He thought about all the good times in life, and laughed at them. They were quite good times. Perhaps his happiest time was spent with Marie, a beautiful woman with whom he would much like to copulate.

The guards still insisted that he see a chaplain, and he eventually had no choice but to give in. He was quite sure that there was no God. Thank the Lord for it, too. God knows how much more messed up the world would be with divine intervention. The only times Meursault had seen the chaplain before was when he refused to see him. The chaplain was an odd man. He was under the distinct impression that Meursault was perhaps a good friend of his. He acted like he was a college buddy and hadn't seen Meursault for a long time. All the logic in the world would tell him otherwise. Yet he insisted on calling Meursault “my friend.” At this point, logic had nothing to do with it.

The chaplain was an austere looking man. He had this nervousness about him that seemed to indicate that he didn’t have many worldly desires except to make heathens see the light. Ironically, he would wind up caught in a horrible explosion which blinded him. A few seconds later, when the explosion would reach him, it would obliterate him. So it goes.

Meursault was eventually able to dismiss the chaplain. The chaplain was getting on Meursault’s nerves, and he didn’t like that. If he had to die, he would much rather die content than stressed out.

The scaffold approached him. As it did, the guillotine’s grin seemed to fade. It was feeling rather lazy today. It didn’t much want to work. Despite its complaining, it still had to execute Meursault. Poor guillotine.

Meursault’s head was placed beneath the blade. He sort of smirked at the just fate of the world. He felt disappointed that the world was so just. If it wasn’t, criminals like him would be at home enjoying a nice cup of tea. But you might as well feel sorrier for the guillotine than for Meursault. Meursault would at least die quickly. The guillotine would last for ages and ages. As timed passed, it would get more weathered and rusted. This is because a chemical process known as oxidation. So it goes.

The executioner released the blade, and the blade fell at the acceleration of 32 feet per second per second. This was in accordance with the Law of Universal Gravitation according to Sir Isaac Newton, which states that a body of mass m will fall towards the center of another mass, M, at an acceleration proportional to the reciprocal of the square of the distance between them. This same law predicts the elliptical orbit of the moon around the earth. According to laws in related fields, determined both empirically and theoretically, it is written according to Astrophysicists that in 5 billion years after the present, the sun shall expand. It will consume the earth and all on it. This is what is written.

Meursault's corpse was subsequently robbed, now in the literal sense.

The following day was bright, sunny, and cheerful. A little bird sang, “Poo-tee-weet?”