Camus' Absurdist Hero
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Few novels have explored the difference between exterior reality and interior life as fully and as effectively as has Albert Camus' The Stranger. The story concerns an office clerk named Mersault (the reader is never given his first name), whose refusal to adhere to societal expectations regarding love, friendship and religion eventually leads to his imprisonment under a death sentence. The novel offers Camus an opportunity to exploit his perception of the world as inherently absurd. The absurdist sees the world as basically meaningless. Events, actions and decisions are all of equal value: one choice is as good as another, and, ultimately, none of the choices one makes has any transcendent purpose. Still, people strive to impose an order on the world. People have an inborn expectation that the world ought to make sense and would make sense if they try hard enough, think hard enough, make enough of the right decisions, are disciplined enough. This is the absurdist condition; that humans are rational creatures doomed to reason out an irrational world. Meursault, then, is the ne plus ultra absurdist hero: a man whose disinterest in love and religion leads to rejection by society. By keeping his integrity, Meursault is doomed to die. Camus summed up the theme of his novel in an introduction to the work for the Bree and Lynes edition: "In our society, any man who does not weep at his mother's funeral risks being sentenced to death" (Camus, as cited in Showalter 14).
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. This condition is precisely what defines Meursault as a stranger. He will not imitate what he p[perceives as a theatrical, false set of behaviors. Because of this, he becomes estranged from others: "Meursault's wrongdoing is not so much from having committed a crime as it is in being, in the sense of theatrical society, a congenital criminal, a criminal "in the soul." This makes a stranger of him (Champigny 15).
However, Meursault has indeed committed a crime. He has shot someone in cold blood. Through a seemingly benign series of decision and actions, Meursault becomes involved with a man who is being stalked out of revenge. Meursault decides to come to the man's aid. He arms himself. After seeing one of the stalkers he confronts him. The stalker pulls out a knife, and Meursault shoots him, then fires four more shots into the body. This event concludes the first half of the book and illustrates the crux of the absurdist problem. The murder is both inexplicable and reasonable. This ambiguity leads to difficulties in critical approach. Can the reader empathize with a murderer? Can the reader condemn someone who has acted so reasonably? These questions give the novel its power: "It is the enigma of the crime--why it took place,
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Approximate Word count = 1948
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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