Two weeks ago I decided to read the book “The stranger” by Albert Camus. I was so impressed by the book that I thought about that for days and wrote an analysis of the book’s narrative and characters on my own. Now, I’m here to share my thoughts with everyone
Part 1 is self-centered on the protagonist’s actions, with a strong introspective focus to understand him and his thought process, while the second part is more about how Mersault’s actions are judged by the others.
The book starts with the mother of the protagonist’s (name is Mersault) death and with the phrase “Today mom is dead. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know”. Well, this event is placed appositely to show how the protagonist is a stranger to the common behavior when a mother dies. This part is voluntarily boring, describing every useless detail of the funeral, because this is what the protagonist feels, an extreme annoyance for participating to the mother’s goodbye ritual. What he wants is just to go home. At a first glance, it could seem a defensive mechanism for the mother’s death but it is not; we could think that the protagonist is a Stranger to himself but it is not; he is just in this way, he doesn’t care about the social rituals, even for his mother death and we will see a lot of times this trait.
Salamano is a neighbor of Mersault and lives with an old dog for eight years. He goes out with the dog twice per day, fighting every time. For example, when Salamano stumbles on the dog, he beats his dog and when the boss forgets his anger, the dog starts to carry him gaining ownership. Apparently, Salamano hates his dog but it is just his way to express his love: in fact, at some point, he loses his dog after beating him; Salamano ringed Mersault home, even if he never greeted the protagonist because occupied insulting the dog but it was so desperate that asked Mersault if he has seen the dog somewhere. Salamano will not see again the dog, but he will start treating Mersault like a friend after this event because it helped to find the dog.
More central in the story is another neighbor of Mersault: Raymond. I chose to put after Salamano because while helping someone to find the missing dog is judged positively by society, what Mersault does with Raymond is judged negatively and really shows the amorality of the protagonist. When Mersault goes for the first time to Raymond’s home, he wrote an intimidatory letter to his Arabian mistress of Raymond and he said that he punched her the last time because suspected she was accepting money from others. Raymond was angry because he thinks the Arabian woman was his property, so it is intolerable to have “interactions” with others. Mersault agreed with him, not because he thought was right but because he observed that he was pleased by his agreement, so he continued without questioning the rightness of the fact. In this framework, we can describe the protagonist as mostly “grounded to the reality”, mostly passive to anything with a slight force to befriend the others. Here we enter in the field of speculation, but I don’t think that this will to befriend the others is emotional but rational. The way Mersault reasons in my opinion is: the other asks him to do something, he does that action, the other is happy and the cycle continues.
To show even more the amorality of the protagonist, he met Maria the next day at the mother’s funeral at the swimming pool. That day they started a relationship. Marie, to Mersault, is probably the strongest attachment to the life he ever has in the story. He enjoys staying with her and having sex but his indifference came back when talking about social rituals. In fact, at some point, she asked if he wanted to marry her and Mersault replied: “I don’t know”. Then, since he noticed that she cares a lot, he said yes but to please her rather than for his will, just like with Raymond.
After some days, Raymond punched again its Arabian mistress but the screams were so strong that the police intervenes to stop them. Then, Mersault has done false testimony to cover him because of his amorality. But then her brother wanted to avenge the sister by punching Raymond. But here the greatest manifestation of Mersault’s amorality happens: getting nervous by the high temperatures, he shot 4 times to the Arabian. He was dead after the first shot, but since he was annoyed by the hot, he shot more times than necessary.
After the fact, he was arrested. While the first part mostly shows how Mersault reasons, the second part shows how society judges his actions externally. This part touches me because shows how internal thoughts and external judgment can be really different. We judge the others by looking at what they do, but are they really enough to understand the others? No. There is a way to understand what Mersault truly felt at the time of the crime? No. So, this is the best way we actually have to judge a person, watching the events and trying to understand what the person truly is. Not doing that, dropping the information of the actions would cause more damage than using them. So in the end, I think they are both right, the Judgment and Mersault but since they cannot communicate win the external Judgment because most of the people cannot comprehend Mersault’s actions. I think that if I was on the jury I would have thought Mersault was a criminal as well.
The incommunicability between the thought of Mersault and the jury reminds me a lot of Neon Genesis Evangelion, an anime series produced during the 90s where they tried to solve the latter problem through the “Human Instrumentality Project”, which fuses all the humans into a unique conscious, allowing them to see the internal thoughts of everyone. Also, in the series, the incommunicability barrier between people has a physical presence, named AT-Field. I will surely talk about NGE in the future because I believe incommunicability causes a lot of problems between people
Before beginning the process, Mersault talks with the judge. He is a strong believer in God, and the judge starts to like him thanks to the benevolent passivity of Mersault. But when the judge pulled too much of the rope, asking him to believe in God, he said no and the relationship suddenly truncated. If Mersault had the will to get out of jail, he had just to lie and say that he started to believe in God, but that’s not Mersault. He is grounded in reality and doesn’t want to believe in what others believe.
Then the process began, and all we discussed in the first part was judged by the others, obliviously negatively. It was painted as a monster for the careless attitude during the mother’s funeral or to date a girl the next day and not for the murder itself. Since Mersault’s behavior cannot be understood, they feared him as a dangerous element of the society, capable of doing dangerous things because he doesn’t follow any rules of the society and then, incapable of empathizing with him in any way, they sentenced him to death. This part shows the true nature of a process: idealistically seeks the truth, but in reality seeks a form, a plausible explanation to the crime that satisfies everyone. This is the absurdity of reality and Mersault is condemned because unable to follow the rules.
Mersault is sentenced to death. In front of the death, Mersault’s behavior is common to anyone, thinking of any way to escape the sentence and to any detail that could save him. The reason is not that Mersault is changed in front of death, but because when any one of us is in front of death, it becomes a “Mersault”; grounded to the reality, without any ideal or moral, just thinking to save himself.
Before death, the prisoner is allowed to see a priest confessing it in front of God before dying. Coherently with the judge, Mersault doesn’t want to waste time with God before death. After three times refusing the priest, he appeared in front of Mersault. After a discussion trying to convert him, for the first time Mersault became angry because the priest’s words were meaningless to him, showing his existentialism; close to death, everything was indistinguishable to him and he doesn’t want to spend the last moments with God. Then, the peace came. That anger freed him from hope and any expectation to be saved from death and allowed him to live the last moments in peace, without any anxiety to be saved. This section is incredible to me because in a few pages the author has described a mental state hard to reach for most people in their whole life: the acceptance of an event if, is the most terrible thing that could happen - a truly living nightmare. Terrible events that we fear daily, like death, losing the job or a person around us, like a parent or the love, through death or a relationship break.
During the night before his death, once accepted his fate his last thoughts go to his mother. For Mersault his mother at the hospice, during the silent nights has felt the same; the oppression of an unavoidable fate but contemporarily the acceptance of such destiny, and that leads her to find a boyfriend. Most people would continue with “even if she was close to death” but I say “because she was close to death”. Without any expectations, without any worrying about living, she was finally free to live as she wanted and thus, to find a boyfriend.
Mersault’s mother state before dying is described in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” by the three metamorphoses as the final one: a smiling child. To understand why, let’s see the two previous states: the camel, which carries its weights through the desert but in the long run the burden will damage the animal. The weights are the burdens of doing something we don’t like, the judgments of the other etc. When the camel drops their weights, it turns into a lion. The lion has to destroy an ancient dragon, called “Thou shalt”, in other words, the old system. When the fight ends it turns into a smiling baby, which creates instead of destroying. In Nietzsche’s words, the baby “is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a Sacred Yes”