L'Étranger

Meta

As I write more of these I keep adjusting how I want to do these posts and what they should actually be. This week, I have decided that my writing should not really be considered a review in any way. Alternatively, it should be considered a shotgunning of my personal thoughts regarding the material, as my thinking is hardly critical enough to be considered a proper review. Similarly, my summaries, despite slightly improving, are extreme wasted space. I will strive to summarize in a single sentence if I can, or a paragraph if I have to. In light of these changes, I will now begin my review personal thoughts on L’Étranger.

L’Étranger is a novel published 1942 written by Albert Camus, a prolific French author. This book tells the short and strange story of a man who, as the title suggests, is a stranger to those around him. Those he grew up with and chose to be around are aliens to him, despite their familiarity with him. We get to see his fundamental detachment destroy the life of another and the consequences of it unfold in this two-part story.

Summary

Part One

The protagonist of the story, Meursault, is told his mother died. He returns home, taking time off his job and finds that he does not really care. He sees others’ grief but cannot understand it himself. The next day, he encounters a woman he used to know and they hit it off. One of his neighbors, a pimp, asks Meursault a favor involving discrediting a (suspected) prostitute. He agrees and somewhat destroys her life without feeling anything. Later faced with marriage or going to Paris, Merusault has no opinion, only wanting to do what has the least negative outcomes. Unfortunately, his perspective of negative outcomes is warped. Invited to a beach, a conflict eventually starts and his friend is injured by a knife. After returning to a cabin, Meursault goes alone and calmly with a gun to find the other party and shoots one of them, killing them.

Part Two

Meursault is put in prison for his crime, but he does not really care. Listlessly passing days, he eventually goes to trial. In this trial, his past indifference comes back to haunt him. The prosecution paints him as a psychopath (which he was) for his inability to care even about his mother’s death. Despite his friends testifying in his favor, the prosection does far better and Meursault is sentenced to death. Something shifts withim Meursault and now he suddenly is full of care – for himself. The prison chaplain tries to get Meursault to find God, causing the first show of emotion seen from him. In a flash of anger, Meursault verbally assaults the chaplain. Afterwards, he no longer has any care again. He is indifferent and happy in his indifference, for he does not care about him looming death. However, it is a different indifference. He shows a hint of empathy for his mother and understands his wrongs and how what is coming for him is what he cosmically deserves.

Thoughts

The apathy of Meursault makes his character enigmatic. Despite not really caring which way the wind blows him, he is still willing to take initiative when poked in a direction, such as by his pimp neighbor. He is able to connect with others on a one-way road. Others can feel like they know him, but he will never feel like he knows someone else. The feeling evoked by this existential conflict throughout the whole story culminates with a reversal in which, for once, the road goes both ways. The reversal is satisfyingly realistic in that he remains the same apathetic person. There is no overly-dramatic shift in character, nor a repentence for what he did. He knows what he did, why he did it, and how while society views it as wrong he simply does not care about it. He understands consequence and does not disagree with it.

Meursault can be likened to the character of Ōba Yōzō from Osamu Dazai’s novel No Longer Human. While The Stranger came before No Longer Human, both came from the same time period (1942 vs 1948). Despite being on different sides of the world, the authors both experienced World War II. However, both authors were unable to participate in physical war efforts due to tuberculosis (Camus had it in the past, while Dazai had it during the draft). It is remarkable that both of these authors and philosophers went through nearly the same events in France and Japan respectively, and ended up creating very similar characters in their greatest works. Afterward, their trajectory remained remarkably similar. Maybe the prison chaplain was on to something…

As a stoic person I can relate to Meursault to a degree. However, he makes going with the flow a form of art. He does not just go with the flow, but he accelerates it as well. A small wave becomes a tsunami with his involvement, as he performs his parts perfectly and without understanding of magnitude. I’m sure that there is a WWII allegory lying in there somewhere, but I’m not a dissector of literature.

Had the author not been excused from the draft, I would have argued that Meursault’s apathy was a PTSD allegory. However, seeing both Camus and Dazai write the same character out of not participating in the war I no longer think this is necessarily the case. The alienation he experiences for others could be the authors feeling a sense of alienation for everyone they know at home. While their friends and family were at war and peril, the authors remained in comparative safety and security. When the war ended, they could not related to their war-scarred brethren. However, their brethren could still relate to them, thus hatching our existential character archetype. On another side of this, we can take the work and efforts of Yukio Mishima. Mishima was declared unfit for duty due to sickness (that was misattributed to tuberculosis). Unlike Camus and Dazai, he pivoted to writing about extreme unity and concepts that were incompatible with isolation.

Meta II

So this was an expectedly fun post to write. I did not do the summaries perfectly as I had wanted to, but they are a hell of a lot better than the Quijote and gay manga ones. I originally did not have many thoughts about this story. I just enjoyed the apathetic character who was taken by the wind to terrible places. However, when I noticed the similarities between Dazai and Camus in their lives and work, I started to appreciate this story much more.

Thank you for reading :3