The Stranger: Meursault’s Changing Voice

Part of: The Deep Reader

This essay discusses the novel in full, including its ending.

While waiting to learn whether he will be executed, Meursault tries to argue that dying now is no worse than dying years later. Death will still be death, and the world will continue without him, but the thought of twenty more years produces a violent leap inside him, which he has to suppress before his argument can proceed. The man so often remembered for his indifference is struggling to make his feelings obey what he has decided is reasonable.

Camus keeps the effort audible within the reasoning. The prose of The Stranger shifts from sensory report to recollection and argument, and the grounds on which we trust Meursault shift with it. Ordinary reports flare into images of assault; an inventory lengthens into sustained reflection; the hesitant observer begins to insist that he has always been right. What can his voice persuade us to accept, and where does the experience he describes resist his account of it?

The sun takes over the sentence

Early in the novel, Meursault often knows how something affects him before he knows what to make of it. At his mother's vigil, he registers fatigue, discomfort and the strange clicking sounds made by the elderly mourners. Although he initially thinks that the dead woman means nothing to them, he corrects himself from the later moment of narration: that impression was probably false. Retrospection has already loosened the authority of the first impression. Meursault can reconsider his judgment of the mourners even though their grief eluded him at the time.

The unadorned succession of bodily states lets us linger over each sensation. Sleepiness need not become a symbol; pleasure in swimming with Marie can occupy the page without a justification. Yet this relative plainness never amounts to a ban on imagery. At the funeral, softened asphalt becomes a pulp beneath the mourners' feet, while pale roots suggest flesh among the falling soil. Camus develops what the senses can do to a person long before he asks them to carry the terrible explanatory burden of the killing.

On the beach, sunlight, heat and glare assail Meursault. The sunlit beach presses from behind; light strikes the knife and turns into an extended blade; sweat covers Meursault's eyes; the sky seems ready to rain fire. These images accumulate across sight, touch and sound until he appears to be under attack by the whole visible world. A knife held at a distance acquires the reach of the sunlight reflected from it, making the separation between the two men feel smaller than the physical scene warrants.

The effect depends on grammar as well as metaphor. Meursault tightens his hand on the revolver, and then: “The trigger gave way.” For a moment, the mechanism becomes the grammatical subject. The gun seems to yield under the pressure that has been gathering throughout the paragraph. We have felt the burning eyes and the sweat before encountering the shot, so the movement from sensation to action can seem almost continuous.

But Camus leaves interruptions inside that continuity. Meursault has already thought that he could turn around. He knows that stepping forward will not free him from the sun. After the first shot, he acknowledges that he has destroyed the day's balance. His account of the shots into a motionless body is unequivocal: “I fired four more times.” The surrounding imagery cannot adequately explain this sequence.

Here the descriptive achievement approaches its limit. Camus gives physical distress such imaginative force that we can feel an explanation forming before we have enough grounds to accept it. The victim receives no comparable space in which to perceive, remember or interpret. Our intimacy with one body's suffering threatens to monopolize the meaning of the encounter. The four additional shots defeat an explanation built on that intimacy, remaining excessive even after the sun has done everything the language can make it do.

Learning to remember a room

Imprisonment changes the use of physical detail. Deprived of familiar places, Meursault begins to remember his room, moving mentally from one corner around the objects and back again. Although the first circuit takes little time, repetition makes it longer. Furniture divides into the objects it holds, objects into their details, and details into a crack, a surface mark, a chipped edge, a color or a grain.

The sentence follows this subdivision, extending itself with each remembered detail. Each remembered thing contains a reason to continue, so that a small room acquires a duration it never required when Meursault was free to leave it. The movement asks us to slow down with him: from the kind of object we can name immediately to the chip or grain peculiar to that one object. The marks he once lived among now occupy him for hours.

Meursault can now arrange the remnants of experience, repeat the arrangement and retrieve more each time. His thoughts develop through the same furniture and surfaces that once surrounded his body, retaining the particularity of those encounters even as their use changes. Reflection develops through this apprenticeship: as Meursault learns to sustain the inventory, he learns how to remember.

His conclusion expands well beyond the experiment when he decides that someone who had lived for a single day would possess enough memories for a hundred years in prison. Remembering has given him hours that confinement would otherwise leave vacant; nothing in that relief warrants the hundred-year claim. His voice follows the same expansion, turning a personal expedient for surviving confinement into a proposition about what any human being could endure.

The effort inside “therefore”

By the last chapter, Meursault speaks openly about calculating the effects of his thoughts. He assumes that his appeal will fail, rehearses the consequence and tries to make his reasoning produce the greatest possible relief. The knowledge that he will die supplies a more resistant subject for these mental exercises.

His calculation depends on viewing a lifetime from far enough away for its length to disappear. Other people will continue living for thousands of years; whether he dies at thirty or seventy, he will eventually be equally absent. Measured against those millennia, the additional years dwindle toward insignificance, until the terrible leap within his body restores their urgency. The future he has reduced to a negligible interval is still capable of exciting him.

Camus is unusually exact about the resulting effort. Meursault suppresses the surge by imagining himself at the later death, obliged to face the same necessity. He has to move his attention away from the years themselves toward their endpoint. At the paragraph's conclusion, the little word “therefore” is interrupted by a parenthesis admitting the effort required to keep all the reasoning behind it in view. To proceed through that connective, he must hold together the considerations that make it usable.

We can sympathize with that labor without accepting the proposed equality of lives. The novel has given pleasure a duration, memory an expanding abundance, and bodily desire an ability to disrupt thought. Those experiences remain present when Meursault tries to equate a curtailed life with a prolonged one. His reasoning is moving partly because its success is uncertain. Camus allows us to stay near a condemned man without requiring us to surrender everything we have learned from him.

A voice that can report its own attempts at composure has outgrown the description of it as emotionally blank. The prose records both the assertion and the effort needed to live with it; conviction has yet to secure the body's assent.

What certainty cannot finish

In the outburst against the chaplain, assertion almost drowns out the effort behind it. Repeated declarations of certainty accelerate into the claim that he has been right in the past, remains right now and has always been right. Questions accumulate without leaving room for an answer. He invokes shared mortality to annul every preference: whom one loves, how one lives, whose conduct deserves esteem.

Having watched him struggle to obtain the assurance he now proclaims, we can feel the force of his refusal while questioning the authority it lends to statements broader than his situation proves. Meursault himself preserves a small contradiction. Even while treating his friendships with Raymond and Céleste as equivalent, he concedes that Céleste is the better man. The judgment survives inside the sentence that tries to make it irrelevant.

Repeated questions press the leveling argument beyond what the novel has earned: shared mortality is made sufficient to settle how a life should be valued. Earlier pleasures, attachments and moral judgments resist that annulment. Yet the novel continues beyond the speech, and its continuation changes the quality of our attention again.

After exhaustion and sleep, Meursault registers stars, distant sounds, night air and the smells of earth and salt. The landscape recalls the funeral, when he had already imagined the consolation his mother might have found there. Near his own death, he returns to her late attachment to another man, now from within the desire to begin again. His understanding remains tentative: it seems to him that he understands. The claim that his anger has purified him is likewise introduced as a possibility, a small qualification whose effect is heightened by the certainty of the outburst. Both qualifications make room for the world and another person's life to exceed what he can say about them.

His final wish for spectators who will greet his execution with hatred prevents this quietness from becoming a complete reconciliation. He still imagines other people responding to him, still attaches a condition to feeling less alone. The voice that has declared the equality of destinies ends with a particular human need. Camus's most persuasive work lies in keeping us close enough to hear that need after the declarations have subsided.

Sources

Albert Camus, The Stranger (L’Étranger), French text, FadedPage ebook 20150715. References are to Parts I–II. The brief English quotations are translated directly from the French for this essay.