Question

Who was the stranger? from chapter the three precious packets.

Answer 1

Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in French colonial Algeria. In 1914, his father was killed in World War I, at the Battle of the Marne. Albert, his mother, and his brother shared a two-bedroom apartment with the family’s maternal grandmother and a paralyzed uncle. Despite his family’s extreme poverty, Camus attended the University of Algiers, supporting his education by working a series of odd jobs. However, one of several severe attacks of tuberculosis forced him to drop out of school. The poverty and illness Camus experienced as a youth greatly influenced his writing.After dropping out of the university, Camus eventually entered the world of political journalism. While working for an anti-colonialist newspaper, he wrote extensively about poverty in Algeria. From 1935 to 1938, Camus ran the Théâtre de l’Equipe, an organization that attempted to attract working-class audiences to performances of great dramatic works. During World War II, Camus went to Paris and became a leading writer for the anti-German resistance movement. He was also the editor of Combat, an important underground newspaper.

While in wartime Paris, Camus developed his philosophy of the absurd. A major component of this philosophy was Camus’s assertion that life has no rational or redeeming meaning. The experience of World War II led many other intellectuals to similar conclusions. Faced with the horrors of Hitler’s Nazi regime and the unprecedented slaughter of the War, many could no longer accept that human existence had any purpose or discernible meaning. Existence seemed simply, to use Camus’s term, absurd.

The Stranger, Camus’s first novel, is both a brilliantly crafted story and an illustration of Camus’s absurdist world view. Published in 1942, the novel tells the story of an emotionally detached, amoral young man named Meursault. He does not cry at his mother’s funeral, does not believe in God, and kills a man he barely knows without any discernible motive. For his crime, Meursault is deemed a threat to society and sentenced to death. When he comes to accept the “gentle indifference of the world,” he finds peace with himself and with the society that persecutes him.

Camus’s absurdist philosophy implies that moral orders have no rational or natural basis. Yet Camus did not approach the world with moral indifference, and he believed that life’s lack of a “higher” meaning should not necessarily lead one to despair. On the contrary, Camus was a persistent humanist. He is noted for his faith in man’s dignity in the face of what he saw as a cold, indifferent universe.

In 1942, the same year that The Stranger was published, Camus also published The Myth of Sisyphus, his famous philosophical essay on the absurd. These two works helped establish Camus’s reputation as an important and brilliant literary figure. Over the course of his career he produced numerous novels, plays, and essays that further developed his philosophy. Among his most notable novels are The Plague, published in 1947, and The Fall, published in 1956. Along with The Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel stands as his best-known philosophical essay. In recognition of his contribution to French and world literature, Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. Tragically, he died in an automobile accident just three years later.

Answer 2

Myths can be used as stories to help explain how things started out. Myths usually have morals or life lessons. Some of the lessons help teach how to use responsibility within a community. People's responsibilities should be to use their needs to help the community become strongly united. 
First, William G. Doty tells the story of "The Three Precious Packets". There once was a man named Niu. Niu was very poor. One day, an elderly man gave Niu three packets. Because Niu was poor, he had no money to buy food. Then Niu burned the first packet and he walked out of a sacred temple with lots of money. He used some of his money to help the poor and those in need. 
Niu wanted to become a Magistrate but he didn't have an education. Then Niu burned the second packet. He passed the test with "flying colours". He helped guide the people. Now that he had become a Magistrate, he felt that he didn't need to burn the last packet. Many years later, he finally burned the last packet and it told him to write his will. Soon after that he passed on and was remembered as a kind and generous man. 
An individuals' needs don't always outweigh the community's needs, but in some situations it can. Individuals' needs should sometimes be needs that will help out the community.