The Stranger
Death’s a stranger; we know of it, we hear of it, but we don’t know much about it. It lingers behind, above, or generally around our conscience— an entity that can simultaneously compel us to live while fully aware that it, along with our physical selves, shall whither and pass. Perhaps sensing a great opportunity in life, it’s our conscience that compels us to make the most of it.
Camus’s stranger, Meursault, embodies the notion of being physically alive but spiritually dead. He dismisses the trivialities of living because he feels time’s irreversible, unwavering gravitation pulling him closer to a certain end: death. Overwhelmed by the certainty of eternal rest, he easily rationalizes the futility of life. Meursault’s pessimism manifests itself while he’s carrying his mother’s casket at her funeral service. It’s particularly hot, the sun’s beating down on him and he reflects, “if you go slowly, you risk getting sunstroke. But if you go too fast, you work up a sweat and then catch a chill inside the church… There was no way out.” A paradox no doubt, but one that can be worked around, maybe go fast at first and then slow down before you enter the church? Maybe move at a modest pace?
However, compromise is not a part of Meursault’s character as he chooses a certain inaction over an ambiguous action time after time. “When I was a student,” Mesursault reflects, “I had lots of ambitions… But when I had to give up my studies I learned very quickly that none of it really matters.” Furthermore, his girlfriend asks him if he would marry her and he says, “it didn’t make any difference to me and that we could if she wanted to… I explained to her that it didn’t really matter and that if she wanted to, we could get married.”
Meursault concedes his existence and fails to seize the opportunity to control his immediate fate. At the onset of a trial against him, he mulls the idea of reassuring everyone that he “was like everybody else, just like everybody else. But really there wasn’t much point”, and gives up the idea “out of laziness.” Later, he laments, “they seemed to be arguing the case as if it had nothing to do with me. Everything was happening without my participation. My fate was being decided without anyone so much as asking my opinion.” Ironically, the trial concludes with the judge asking him if he has anything to say, Meursault takes a moment before he answers, “No.”
For Meursault, the most important thing was being right, being certain. Being right transcended the frivolities of his day to day existence. As he insists, “I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn’t done that… Nothing, nothing mattered… A dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future… this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time.” Meursault makes a personal choice (one he fails to see) by yielding to the inevitability of fate and thereby expediting his demise. He was never looking to confirm the power of the individual, but the “gentle indifference of the world.”
By treating the world with the same gentle indifference he expected from it, he proves himself right: the world is indifferent, neutral to our passing. He reflects, “I was sure about me, about everything… sure about my life and sure of the death I had waiting for me. Yes, that was all I had… I had been right, I was still right, I was always right.”