Oppression is a theme often present in works that speak of our humanity, mortality and (of course) our freedoms. The binary of freedom and oppression will come into play in most narratives that reflect on ethics, but we find this theme predominantly in stories that examine the nature of law and justice, as well as those that explore the defining characteristics of our humanity. Both texts feature protagonists who are investigated for crimes that, in one way or another, they were unaware of having committed. Meursault in The Outsider shoots an Arab on a beach in a fog of sensory turmoil, while Katharina in Katharina Blum's Lost Honor has the misfortune of falling in love with a convicted murderer and is accused first of helping him escape and then of being been involved in his criminal offences. Also common to both books is the corruption of facts, either because social powers (such as the courts or the media) are unable to understand what our characters have done, or do not want to do it out of fear, or out of a dark lust . so that events become a sordid story. In these cases we are faced not only with the oppression of the "victims" of history, but also with the general public, who are denied by their own desire access to the truth, and of course the distortion and control of the truth itself. When we talk about oppression, we are most often referring to unfair treatment by some kind of authority. While that particular definition of the word is present in both The Outsider and The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, we can also find the theme of oppression in the sense of “mental pressure or anguish.” Both books, though most prominently The Outsider, discuss freedom in a philosophical context… at the heart of the paper… pressure manifests itself in both stories in similar and familiar ways. Both our protagonists find themselves facing the physical oppression of the law and its power over their freedoms, and begin to engage in an absurd struggle against the forces of the law, social expectations and lies. Also similar in both books is the human fear of absolute rationality, something that grants Katharina and Meursault a great deal of personal strength and freedom, but ultimately proves to be their undoing when they need to appear sympathetic or vulnerable to survive. the sentence passed on them.Works CitedBöll, Heinrich. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. Camus, Albert. The Stranger. London [etc.: Penguin Books, 1983.Camus, Albert. The myth of Sisyphus and other essays. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.