Death in A Farewell to Arms and The OutsiderHemingway once said that "all stories...end in death". Certainly the "story" of every living thing ends like this. The interrelation of a narrative with a life, of the "limit situation" of an ending, is vital to the existence of these two fictional narratives, A Farewell to Arms and The Outsider. Death also plays an important, one might say necessary, role in both novels: Frederic Henry is, of course, at war and witnesses death many times, gets injured and loses Catherine; Meursault's story begins with the death of his mother, then he kills an Arab, and then he is tried and sentenced to death. Indeed, the decisive mortal clashes (Frédéric's loss of Catherine, Meursault's death sentence) transform the characters into narrators; that is, stories are told because of confrontation with death. We must recognize that fictional characters are attempting to provide or create order or meaning where there appears to be none. Or there are pre-existing versions, meta-narratives, which prove inadequate or unsatisfactory and which must be replaced by the narrative produced by each character. Meursault responds directly and violently to the priest who represents one such meta-narrative for Meursault's life. In the crescendo of the final scene of that novel, when Meursault confronts the priest and finally releases the pent-up anger and frustration he has held back for so long, he experiences an epiphany: as if this great burst of anger had purified all my ills. , killed all my hopes, I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and opened myself for the first time to the benevolent indifference of the world. And finding it so much... at the center of the paper... of the Myth of Sisyphus in The Outsider, and particularly to the discussion of the search for truth. In the Myth Camus takes an inventory of the accepted sources of truth and finds them all wanting: first he tries religion, but surprisingly it is too relative, so god is god; secondly he tries science, but finds that it offers not precision but metaphor (the world is like...); thirdly he tries logic, but finds that paradoxically it leads to contradiction (because if "all statements are true" is true, then "no statements are true" must be one of the true statements). He is left with the "I" - not the Cartesian "I" - but the Humean "I" (a bundle of perceptions) as the foundation for a system of meaning. That changing, evolving, non-static “I” is the focus. heart of both these works. Works Cited: Hemingway, Ernest. A farewell to arms. New York: Simone, 1957.