Maturity Comes From Maintaining One's Beliefs

Growth and maturity can be defined through many different ways and aspects. To me, growth and maturity comes with experience and insight on situations and life in general, and no one stops growing and learning about life. I see our generation, and sometimes just people in general, make what they find to be a mature decision though they don't really understand or see what makes it mature. What they do understand about these decisions is surfaced, they only see the first layer of what makes a decision mature. I connected this with Mersault's decision to look at life as meaningless. He understands the surface of it, that we all die, our actions, hopes, dreams, and fears are pointless, and takes on the role of an existentialist. However, as I've said before and will continue to echo through all of my posts, novels usually play out a characters growth as a person and takes the entirety of the novel to do so and in the very last paragraph of the novel, readers are exposed to Mersault's first and final step of growth and maturity.  Something I would like to point out, just because you believe in something that others or society doesn't believe in and outcasts, doesn't make that belief immature. The maturity comes from finding how it connects with you and makes up who you are, maintaining your faith in that belief, and being able to use your understanding and connection with that belief to support your life. It wasn't until the end of his trial and his final death that reflects his maturity that he very well might have had for the entirety of the novel and never fully revealed, or found in the end of the novel. When the judge forces religion upon him, almost as an ultimatum to innocence or guilt, being a free man or death, Mersault never abandons his beliefs. It is this maturity of maintaining his understanding and acceptance of not only life but himself, that reveals just how he has grown through the novel. It his final acceptance of his fate and life and death that makes Mersault a mature man. It seems that he understands the world from a different point of view, considers all angles, and does not let these different perspectives change who he is, but let him be more aware and ready for death. In his final moments, he comes to an understanding as to why his mother never gave up life, how she always strived to keep her life worth living. Though he does not and may not have ever found things worth living for, he can understand enough to make  him insightful. And the fact that even in his most desperate moment of life, he never ceases to remain who he has been all his life, good or bad, it is who he is and what he believes in, and that is truly mature.