Imagery & odd narrator

So I’m about halfway through Camus’s “The Stranger” and one of the aspects that I like about Camus’s writing techniques (or perhaps this has been slightly changed by the way it was translated from French to English?) is how he uses visual imagery in describing everything from turning-point events to everyday occurrences and to help with characterization of other characters- essentially I think we’re better able to understand the narrator’s odd perspective of everything and how the environment that the narrator was in at that very moment really influenced his actions. The part that I really liked was at the end of Chapter 1 when Meursault (the narrator) describes how “Several other images from that day have stuck in my mind: for instance, Perez’s face when he caught up with us for the last time, …[b]ig tears of frustration and exhaustion were streaming down his cheeks…the red geraniums on the graves in the cemetery, Perez fainting (he crumpled like a rag doll), the blood-red earth spilling over Maman’s casket…” (Camus 18).  I just liked how these glimpses show us what happened but don’t contain all the details- in a way showing us how the narrator feels removed from the whole procession (not quite experiencing the extreme grief –as Perez was expressing—that people would normally expect him to feel and express if he was as close to his mother as Perez was) and doesn’t really register the event or feels more mildly irritated by the inconvenient nuances accompanied with burial ceremony (the vigil through the night, the heat during the procession to the cemetery that would give one a sunstroke if they went too slow, and a cold if they went to fast and worked up a sweat).
            In examining the narrator himself, he seems like a rather calm, ambivalent, laid-back, conflict-avoiding person—for most of the time.  Meursault just seems to not have many passionate opinions of his own or clear guidelines; he seems to yield willingly to everyone else’s opinions and doesn’t really care about much.  For example when Raymond tells him about how he thinks this girl is cheating on him and he wants to beat her up and the get back with her, he doesn’t really offer any opinion or advice but simply agrees with him without cautioning him that perhaps he was overreacting and he would probably get caught by the police if he beat her, which he eventually did.  And then whenever his own girlfriend Marie asks him if he wants to get married or even if he just loves her he always disappoints her with an ambivalent answer—I guess he doesn’t really care about or think too much about what most other people care about (falling in love, coping with grief after a loved one has died, being more successful at life, etc.)  But though he doesn’t seem to be passionate about much, it seems like his actions are also easily influenced by his surroundings in the moment.  For example when he goes back to the beach to find the cool spring behind the rock, the sun, the heat, the tension, the blinding burning light that shot off the Arab’s knife as was like a “long flashing blade cutting at my forehead” (Camus 59) ultimately drove him to commit the reckless murder.