In The Stranger, the readers become familiar with the main character, Meursault, whose indifference and detachment stand out to the reader and can be seen in his interactions with the world around him. At the beginning of the novel, he receives news of his mother’s death but exhibits a lack of emotion that seems callous. Instead of grieving over his loss, he seems almost entirely absorbed by his sensory experiences: the heat of the day, the bright sunlight, and the feeling of fatigue. Camus shows Meursault's indifference in the first sentence: "Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure" (Camus 1). This blunt acknowledgment of her death, devoid of sentiment or reflection, is Meursault’s first signal to the reader that he doesn’t relate to events in the way society expects. Furthermore, Meursault goes on to elaborate on when the death occurred rather than the fact that his own mother died.
Throughout the book, Camus creates Meursault’s world using a sensory-driven prose. In his narration and descriptions, Meursault focuses on physical sensations and surroundings rather than his internal emotions. For example, when he describes his mother’s funeral, his fixation on the sun and the heat feels more present to him than his mother’s death. "It was a blazing hot afternoon. It was almost as if the heat were pressing down on me, making it hard for me to breathe" (Camus 16). Here, Camus uses the relentless sun as more than just a setting detail. It becomes a metaphor for Meursault’s own mental state: oppressive, disorienting, and focused only on the immediate. Rather than processing grief, Meursault is absorbed by the physical discomfort around him.
This persistent focus on the sensory over the emotional defines how Meursault approaches everything, including his relationships. When his girlfriend, Marie, asks him if he loves her, his response is blunt and unemotional: “I told her it didn’t mean anything but that I didn’t think so” (Camus 35). He does not dwell on what love is or why he feels or doesn’t feel this way. To him, it is just a factual question to answer. Through this response, Camus reinforces Meursault’s detachment from societal expectations about love, relationships, etc. Even Marie’s reaction hints at her own discomfort with his indifference and how his worldview makes it impossible to connect deeply with him.
As the novel reaches its climax, we see Meursault's detachment shift into defiance. His lack of remorse and detachment from traditional moral expectations shock those around him. During his trial, Meursault’s lack of conventional grief over his mother’s death becomes just as central to the case as his actual crime he committed. Society has a framework of right and wrong, and his inability to perform his grief places him outside its bounds. In the end, Meursault’s existential confrontation with meaninglessness becomes a stand against societal structures, even if he never intended it that way. This deviation from societal norms leaves him alienated, or, as the title suggests, a stranger. He comes to view life and the inevitable end we all face as absurd.
The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker is a novel that gives the reader a thorough insight to a man's thoughts throughout his day working at an office. The man, Howie, seems like an average man living an average life yet the way he thinks is aberrative. Howie thinks in a method called defamiliarization which goes into great detail about objects someone would normally not even think about. One instance of his extensive description of mundane details is Howie’s detailed explanation of a door handle in chapter 3. “What a beautiful invention!—the door handle, first of all in itself, which through use of the cylinder of the spindle caused the relatively modest pressure of your arm to multiply as force on the latch, retracting it against the bias of the spring that held it out. And then the smoothly hemispherical escutcheon plate that covered up the works: what a clean, well-formed world lay in store behind this door, a world of practical and effective shapes and design decisions, no less c...
I don't think his response to Marie was focused on enough, he has an interesting lack of emotion throughout the entire book, and that point was a great display of it. His non existent feelings for his mother's funeral letter at the beginning of the book should have been a sign from the beginning. His character was a robotic being that was capable of nothing more than approaching tasks as they approached him.
ReplyDeleteIn a sense, you seem to agree with the prosecutor that there is something potentially threatening--to ordinary society--about Meursault's point of view. Is he an "abyss threatening to swallow society," simply because he doesn't know (or care) how to act at a funeral? There is indeed something demonstrably absurd about the connections made by the prosecution between his behavior at the funeral and the shooting of the man on the beach, but you seem to be saying that his "strangeness" DOES track as heartless, callous, indifferent, and therefore potentially dangerous and violent.
ReplyDeleteIn this context, I would definitely want to think about the ways he talks (shouts!) about his mother's death when he unloads on the chaplain: among all the other things he denounces about the chaplain's religious worldview and the "hope" his faith represents, Meursault goes off on how "no one has the right" to cry for his mother, and that he "understands" the way she felt at the end of her life. He fits HER death into his absurdist view of the world, in other words, and even posits her as a kind of existentialist/absurdist model for how to live, "playing at starting over" with a "fiance" at the end of life. The strongest affirmation of life this book can offer is that Meursault feels "ready to live it all again" after his outburst--even though the whole game is absurd, that coincidence can lead him to a fun time with Marie or a senseless murder on the beach, and that neither "means anything," he AFFIRMS life at the very end and insists that he has been more alive all this time than the priest could ever understand.
It's important to include this climactic emotional outburst in any consideration of Meursault's character, precisely because it looks like such a stark departure from his characteristics before this scene.
I like how you point out the way in which Meursault is written: focusing on the physical, objective world rather than the unseen, subjective one. Through the prose of the story, we are shown that it is precisely the fact that Meursault's perspective is written in pure objectivity that makes him appear to us as a callous character. Great blog!
ReplyDeleteI think Meursault's lack of emotion causes people to not get to know him. People like that he doesn't judge and his good listening skills. However, he doesn't really have friends even though Marie seems drawn to him. Great post!
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