DE Weekly: Camus, The Stranger, & Absurdism
Below is an archived email originally sent on October 14, 2024.
Camus, The Stranger, & Absurdism
“Maman died today.” This opening line from Albert Camus’s The Stranger is one of the most famous lines ever written by any of the existentialists. For good reason, too; it begins one of the best works of existentialist fiction, a story so important because of its mastery of Absurdism.
Absurdism underlies much of the best existentialist literature. And the master of absurdism is none other than Camus.
If you’ve never read The Stranger before, I highly recommend it. It’s essential reading for understanding existentialism.
For now, I’ll do my best to break it down for you.
In The Stranger, we follow the narrative of a character named Meursault, living in French Algeria.
The book opens with Meursault receiving word that his mother had died. Shortly after, he attends her funeral.
From here, we quickly pick up on the most important aspect of Meursault’s personality: his general indifference to the world.
He doesn’t seem to grieve the death of his mother. He also doesn’t seem to understand why others find that peculiar.
For him, it just doesn’t seem like such an important event:
“It occurred to me that anyway one more Sunday was over, that Maman was buried now, and that, really, nothing had changed” (24).
Meursault’s indifference doesn’t only apply to others. It goes for his own life, too.
Later in the book, he has a conversation with his boss, who can’t understand why he doesn’t have more ambition.
He explains to him that he was once a young student with ambition, but then “I learned very quickly that none of it really mattered” (41).
Beyond these examples, Meursault’s indifference is so pervasive that it lands him in serious trouble later in the book.
After an encounter with a group of men on the beach, under duress from the sun’s heat beating down on him, Meursault shoots and kills a man.
He’s arrested for it, and held in jail to await his trial. The way the trial plays out is the crux of the whole story.
Everyone from here on out tries to reason with Meursault, to get him to understand the weight of his crime.
The Magistrate learns that Meursault doesn't believe in God. He says if God doesn’t exist, then his life would be meaningless. This doesn’t shake Meursault.
The prosecutor in the trial tries to make Meursault understand that all of this couldn’t just happen “by chance”, as he claimed it did. This doesn’t shake Meursault.
It’s not until he’s sentenced to death by guillotine that he understands his fate.
Riding back in the prison van from the courthouse to his cell, he notices the summer evening air, and remembers a time he was happy:
“What awaited me back then was always a night of easy, dreamless sleep. And yet something had changed, since it was back to my cell that I went to wait for the next day . . . as if familiar paths traced in summer skies could lead as easily to prison as to the sleep of the innocent” (97).
This is the focal point of the book: Meursault’s realization of the absurd. How anything at any time can lead to any outcome, and you can experience it all as one person.
“The utter pointlessness of whatever I was doing there seized me by the throat, and all I wanted was to get it over with and get back to my cell and sleep” (105).
Once he is sentenced to death, it is too late for Meursault. There is no way to escape his fate. This is ultimately what leads to his realization of the absurd.
At the end of the story, when he’s being led to his death at the guillotine, he understands how his mother must have felt close to her own death.
“So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again. Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her . . . I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world . . . I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again” (122-123).
This is what Camus explained as the nakedness of man faced with the absurd.
We can only overcome the absurdity of life and of the universe when we accept it and face it head on.
In even the extremest example, the act of murder leads the murderer to freedom. It did for Meursault, anyway.
Our existence is absurd. We spend our lives searching for meaning in the universe, but the universe–being devoid of any real meaning–makes that an irrational task, humanly impossible to achieve. Yet, we march on in the effort.
When asked if the meaninglessness of life requires us to give up and commit suicide, Camus replied, “No. It requires revolt.” And so, we revolt. Every day, with every choice we make. We stand up to absurdity and face it at every turn.
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
I’d like to highlight examples of existentialism in pop culture for future newsletters and other Daily Existentialist content. If you have any personal favorites you’d like to see included, be sure to let me know. I’ll do my best to include it.
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