The world has a profound fear of impassive individuals. NOT the mass killers or the tyrants, the latter at least subscribe to the rules of hatred and greed etc. A Meursault, a man who passes through the pages of Albert Camus’s novel dazed and indifferent to the world around him, inspires a primal fear. He’s the man who will not lie, no matter the necessity of the situation. In a world of collective illusions, the refusal to fib can be the deadliest act of all.
What’s remarkable about The Stranger has nothing to do with Meursault’s killing of the man. That’s been done before in literature. What’s remarkable is that Meursault doesn’t put in the performance of mourning at his mother’s funeral, the performance of love at his mother’s graveside, the performance of remorse at trial. What’s remarkable about Meursault is that Meursault takes a bow and exits the play. And this makes him terribly dangerous.
Most people believe the book is about absurdism. Of course, the universe is indifferent, there’s no meaning handed down from above, the meaninglessness of existence is an arbitrary series of events. The point about the book being about absurdism isn’t the meaninglessness of the universe, it’s the meaninglessness of society. It’s the horror of a man who doesn’t pretend to find meaning in society’s rituals.
Meursault’s most grievous offense is the truth he tells.
He speaks the truth when saying he doesn’t love Marie “in the way she means.” This reflects him being straightforward about his emotions. This reveals that
He tells the truth when he says that he slept well when his mother died.
He tells the truth that he shot the Arab because the sun was in his eyes. One of the ways in which the novel relates the story of the Kaspar
And when the final decision has to be made between being the same as others and being truthful, his choices will always be the truth. The question Camus is asking is: What would happen if a man were to live without hypocrisy?
The answer: society would kill him.
In the trial scene, the crime of murder doesn’t matter to anyone. What matters is the funeral. The trial becomes a morality play in which Meursault takes the role of the monster not because of the crime he committed but because of the guilty party’s own understanding of what the monster is: a man who doesn’t want to play along with the collective delusion that people must feel their emotions when asked. Meursault’s punishment is death for non-compliance.
This is the complexity of the novel. Meursault doesn’t embody the hero, the villain, or the admirable rebel. He embodies nothing but the ability to accept the world’s indifference without trying to mask this indifference through metaphors of meaning, through religion, through sentiment, through performance. This raw acceptance makes people’s hair stand on end. They must see meaning emerging from somewhere. Meursault’s absence of meaning production amounts to a threat to the totality of the societal order.
And yet in the prison cell when he finally breaks through in this flash of brilliant insight, what we see there has been the point Camus has been trying to express from the beginning: the freedom that lies not in rejecting the world but in refusing to lie about it. Meursault, the man who felt nothing, becomes the only man who feels everything: the wind, the stars, the night, the raw delight of the universe that owes him nothing and yet sparkles anyway.
He dies guilty, but he dies conscious. And Camus also provides us with this chilling question: “If the world needs a lie in order to allow us to live in it, then what does this say about the world? And what does it say about us if this is something that we’ll accept?”