Both Meursault in Camus' The Stranger and Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment were profoundly existentialist: each viewed himself as "an individual in a purposeless universe" (as Webster's defines it) who could depend only on his free will and rational mind. They took different paths to solve their mutual dilemma, life. Meursault became a passive observer -- nothing mattered, nothing touched him -- and he watched dispassionately as his life slipped away from him. Raskolnikov became a student radical and cared deeply about life -- especially his own philosophies and ideas -- and he took drastic actions in the hopes of improving both his and others' lives. Yet both their philosophies led them to commit murder: Meursault through careless disdain, Raskolnikov through an overpassionate concern with intellectual ideas and ideals that did not hold human lives to be all that important.

Meursault epitomized existentialist apathy as the ultimate rational, emotion-free man who lived only in the moment, caring little for past or future. The Stranger was written in the same manner in which he lived his life: a shadow play of "interesting" (a favorite word of his) happenstance to be observed detachedly with deeper levels of thought and meaning barely touched upon. What did it matter, really, what day his mother died? Or how old she was? Or whether he went to a comic film the next day? Or if he were to transfer to Paris, or to get married? Or if he killed a man he knew nothing of and held no grievance against, but simply "because of the sun"? He didn't care, and it is little wonder that the court sentenced him to death mainly because of his utter lack of soul. Eventually, after his profound apathy overcame his instinctive reflexes against impending execution, he decided he didn't really care much about life in general, since "this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably." The universe was pointless, so what did anything really matter at all?

But if Meursault cared too little for life, Raskolnikov perhaps cared too greatly. His mind was not filled with ambivalent fog, with petty details of life, as was Meursault's; it was embroiled with the intellectual turmoil of the age. Society was rotten, anyone in Petersburg could see; one "old louse" held captive money that could benefit many more deserving people; were there not Napoleonic "extraordinary men" who could break the law and commit murder, "in the name of conscience", if such would help the mass of humanity? and was he not such a man for creating such a "new word" in philosophy? Eventually the feverish swirl of ideas and events and people and justifications and reasonings raging through his mind boiled over, and Raskolnikov reached the seemingly logical conclusion that he should kill the old pawnbroker. The universe belonged the men extraordinary of thought and will, and for such individuals law was pointless.

Meursault, the man with no firm beliefs, and Raskolnikov, the man with overpowering radical beliefs, were both misled by their reasoning (or lack thereof) to commit murder; the former murdered just because, the latter because he convinced himself that it was morally imperative that he kill, but both killed. This was in part because they failed to recognize a certain quantum truth about the universe: it is impossible to observe without being affected in some way. Imagining himself apart from the mass of humanity, Meursault could not simply watch the world go by and remain uncaught by the relentless force of events shaped by those who took a more active view of life. Raskolnikov likewise could not expect to isolate himself and to glorify his own intellect, and not fall prey to miscalculation. Yet while Raskolnikov was tormented with guilt and eventually confessed, thereby clearing the way for him to leave his existentialist fervor and have a real life, Meursault remained a cipher: his life, like his crime, seems utterly pointless. Raskolnikov may have been a brilliant young man who went far astray through too much attention to radical ideas, coming perilously close to losing his life; Meursault was only a shadow of a man, a dimensionless facade that had no life to lose.