“The Stranger” by Albert Camus

K. LAKSHMI DEVI
Department of English, Andhra University

Albert Camus belongs not only to France but to the world. His untimely death in an automobile accident in 1962, has removed from us a great literary figure and a man of considerable authority deeply concerned with the spiritual dilemma of our age. Camus’ assumption that life has no ultimate meaning, his determined refusal of hope exactly fit the mood of our times. He is eminently fitted for the task of presenting the current crisis in human affairs.

Camus’ work has a special appeal for the reason that Camus is a humanist with a deep sympathy for mankind. His sympathy springs from a full and often poignant life. He worked in close company of other men and women in an ardent common cause–the Resistance Movement–and he suffered deeply in his personal life.

In approaching Camus’ work it is necessary to bear in mind the two complementary themes with which Camus’ name is associated: the theme of Absurdity and Revolt, treated in his essays; the Myth of Sisyphus and Revolt. The word ‘absurd’ is misleading if rendered literally into English. The best English equivalent would seem to be ‘futile’ or ‘purposeless,’ though even these words do not convey Camus’ meaning accurately. The state of absurdity results from man’s desire to understand his destiny and the limitations of his intelligence to do so–from man’s aspiration towards immortality and the realization of mortality, from his desire for achievement and the vanity of all human aspiration.

The concept of absurdity became essential to Camus. A robust, athletic youngman confident of the future, Camus suddenly learnt that he had tuberculosis and most of his hopes were blighted. Soon after this came Munich, the European war and the collapse of France. The young Camus was suddenly confronted by a wall of the absurd. It seemed to him that Man wants rationality but he is faced everywhere by the irrational. Man is impelled by the will to control and steer his fate but he is powerless to do so. He longs for freedom, fraternity; everywhere he encounters a selfish social order, a dried up bureaucracy, a mechanized world on the brink of another impersonal mass-slaughter. Camus refused to take solace in the idea of some comforting transcendence. It is that atheistic attitude which draws Camus strongly towards the existential philosophers. But as Satre has pointed out Camus is not an existentialist. It is true that he shares many of their views. Like them, he too finds it impossible to take up an attitude of easy optimism. As Camus had said on one occasion “it is impossible for anyone of the generation which had grown up to the drum beats of the First World War to be hopeful.” Our history since then has been a continuous tale of murder, violence, and injustice. As such, it is not surprising that we find Camus writing repeatedly about death, violence, the utter absurdity and incoherence of life.

It was with the publication of his novel, The Stranger, in 1942, that Camus first became one of the best known French writers. The novel provides not the demonstration but the feel of the absurd–as Camus conceives it. In this brief novel Camus presents a hero hitherto unknown in fiction–a fusion of Camus’ metaphysical ideas and his observation of human conduct. Meursault, an Algerian clerk, is indeed an outsider, a stranger alienated not merely from society but also from himself. He lives from day to day, almost hour to hour, without any beliefs and motivations. He has no purpose in life and no ideal to give definition to his actions. Indeed, no single or particular action seems to him more essential than another. To give an example, in the opening pages of the novel Meursault receives the news of his mother’s death. The thought of her death and the faint annoyance he feels at having to ask for two days casual leave to attend the funeral weigh equally with him. Similarly in the office the pleasant dryness of the towel at midday and its clamminess in the evening seems to capture his attention more than the prospect of a transfer or promotion.

Meursault’s life is a drab and uneventful one. He lives a singularly detached, unemotional life. His first conflict with the code of society occurs at his mother’s funeral. His calm air of detachment, and lack of expression of grief shock the inmates and officials of the home for the aged where Meursault had placed his mother three years earlier since they had nothing more to say to one another. Meursault experiences things vividly enough on the physical plane. He notes with a kind of clinical detachment such details as the colours of the nurses’ dress, the newness of the nails in his mother’s coffin. While his senses are finely receptive of his experience, his mind gives it no total meaning.

Meursault goes swimming the next day with a girl called Marie, takes her to a movie and goes to bed with her that night. When he meets her again, Marie asks him whether he loves her. The question is meaningless to him and he says as much. But he agrees to her suggestion that they should get married with a typical remark that it is all the same to him. He next becomes involved in an unpleasant brawl with some Arabs because of his acquaintance with a rather unsavoury neighbour, Raymond. In the course of the brawl Meursault sees the glint of the sun on the Arab’s knife, pulls the trigger of the revolver which he is carrying and kills the Arab-without understanding why or even caring to enquire into the reasons. His only excuse is that the sunlight dazzled him and produced a momentary hallucination.

It is when Meursault is brought to justice that he comes into conflict for the second time with conventional ethics. The Judge and Jury attach greater blame to his callous behaviour at the time of his mother’s funeral than to his actual crime. Meursault feels strangely remote from their strictures like an outsider at the trial of a stranger. He is condemned to death. The passivity with which he greeted all that had happened suddenly breaks down at the prison chaplain’s visit. The chaplain’s prayers and the consolation he offers of another life sting Meursault into a violent affirmation that his life alone is certain. It is a moment of illumination. When confronted by death Meursault is forced to evaluate experiences which will be denied to him forever. To the surprise of the readers Meursault realizes that he has been happy in his life and that he would like to live it all over again. He hopes that at his execution there will be many people who will greet him with cries of hatred. At a first reading this ending is incomprehensible. But in this outburst Camus is, as it were, providing a justification for Meursault’s apathy throughout. For Meursault the absurdity arises out of his realisation of his own mortality. As he says, “What did other people’s death matter, what did love for my mother matter, what did his God matter, since one fate would single me out and together with me a million others?” Thus one reason for Meursault’s apathy is the continuous prospect of death–it is one aspect of the absurd. The absurd also frees man from all feeling of responsibility, annihilates the future and leaves only one certainty–the sensation of being alive.

While reading the novel one finds oneself asking the question, in what way is this man Meursault relevant to us and to our times? Meursault obviously symbolises modern man who is a product of science and technology, one without a moral or religious purpose, in short, the pattern of thousands of twentieth century people who do not believe in anything outside the boundaries of their own lives.

            The Stranger is a working out of Camus’ belief that human destiny, with all its contradictions, must be accepted as it is and life must be lived accordingly. This life need not be transcended but it has to be lived. Although Meursault appears as a stranger to society and himself, he is not completely indifferent to the world. Meursault’s domain is the physical world. To swim, to walk, to feel the sun on the face and to make love–it is these experiences which have given him happiness and which make him wish to live the same life again. Indeed Meursault’s awareness of the colours, lights and sensations of the external world is so acute that at times it seems to recall a mystical experience. Camus does not mask the despair inherent in the human condition. Through Meursault’s characterisation he shows us that the absurdity of the world is paradoxically enough, an invitation to happiness. As Camus puts it, “death comes to everyone, but after all, the sun warms our bodies despite everything.” It is an acceptance of the tragic dualism of life. Camus seems to believe in a life given over only to the present without myths, without the consolation of traditional religious or moral beliefs. Camus is an optimist about the value of man though a pessimist about his destiny.