23: Book Review 8, The Stranger by Albert Camus

“I knew I’d shattered the balance of the day, the spacious calm of this beach on which I had been happy. But I fired four shots more into the inert body, on which they left no visible trace. And each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing.”(76)

This reminded me of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” and Nabokov’s “Pnin” in that the main character, Arthur Meursault, was almost fully passive in the entire unfolding of his life. The writing flowed easily through a plot of an increasingly confounding absurdist story, one that pivots between nihilism and determinism. He kills a man “by pure chance”, almost with the same nonchalance as one kills a pesky bug on a hot day. 

From there, the inner workings of Meursault’s mind are revealed to be nothing but the simplest of machines, nonsensical, almost animal-like in their immediacy of experience. In the moment he was exhausted and hot and happened to have a gun in his hand, so naturally he emptied the clip into a man of a small adjacent drama who was relaxing on a beach.

Meursault was a man who was a stranger to everyone, including himself. 

Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd." On a philosophical level, this novel confronts the ideas of determinism, fatalism, and free will.  

The film adaptation cover from 1967.

“And on its way that breeze had leveled out all the ideas that people tried to foist on me in the equally unreal years I then was living through. What difference would they make to me, the deaths of others, or a mother’s love, or his God; or the way a man decides to live, the fate he thinks he chooses, since one and the same fate was bound to ‘choose’ not only me but thousands of millions of [others].”(152)

The phrase “the fate he thinks he chooses” stood out to me at the end of this short novel. If fatalism is the theory that there’s an unavoidable destiny we can take different paths to yet arrive at the same conclusion, while determinism is the theory that the entire unfolding of our lives is predestined, Camus rides the line between both. 

He is fatalistic in the lead up to Meursault’s sunshine killing, harping on the feeling of his mother’s death being insignificant, unavoidable, and singularly dull. “It occurred to me that somehow I’d got through another Sunday, that Mother now was buried, and tomorrow I’d be going back to work as usual. Really, nothing in my life had changed.”(30)

Yet Camus is also deterministic in creating a murder scene so surreal, almost colored with magical realism, that it seemed as if Meursault functioned under some kind of synaptic spell that rendered his reasoning mind inert. It was as if he were being controlled by something other than himself. “Then everything began to reel before my eyes, a fiery gust came from the sea, while the sky cracked in two, from end to end, and a great sheet of flame poured down through the rift. Every nerve in my body was a steel spring, and my grip closed on the revolver.”(76)

After the murder, I couldn’t help thinking of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. I found a quote from his work that explained Camus’ infamously absurd anti-protagonist: “Almost every criminal is subject to a failure of will and reasoning power by a childish and phenomenal heedlessness, at the very instant when prudence and caution are most essential. It was his conviction that this eclipse of reason and failure of will-power attacked a man like a disease developed gradually and reached its highest point just before the perpetration of the crime, continued with equal violence at the moment of hate crime and for longer or shorter time after, according to the individual case, and then passed off like any other disease.”(Dostoyevsky, 63)

In this excerpt, I wondered if Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov and Camus’ Meursault both suffered from a similar case of “a failure of will-power”, like a disease, that simply passed away after the moment of ecstatically permanent murderousness. 

“It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.”(154)

The question then lingers, is anyone capable of murder under the “right” confluence of outside pressures, feelings, or culminations of manic desperation? Or was Camus too literal, oversimplifying complex emotions of a grieving son to the point of rendering him a psychotic and unfeeling symbol of absurdism?

Thanks for reading! Please leave a comment below or on the instagram @leaninginblog if you found this interesting or have an answer to the above question.

Gabby