Part I. What Makes Us Human?

Analysing Albert Camus' "The Stranger" (a thought-dump with no structure or anything really).

all images sourced from luchino visconti's “the stranger”

“Maman died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.”

The first of Camus' novels follows Meursault, an emotionally detached French Algerian man who— weeks after his mother's funeral— kills an unnamed Arab man. The story is divided into two parts, presenting Meursault's first-person narrative before and after the killing.

Before picking up the novel, I knew nothing about philosophy. Sure, I had heard some names here and there— Kafka, Nietzsche, Pluto (names I’d mostly heard whilst watching “The Good Place,” if I’m honest)— though besides that, philosophy seemed like a far too distant, abstract idea. The only knowledge I had of nihilism was the flawed, subjective belief that all nihilists must be psychopaths. I could not fathom how people, like Meursault, could live a life without meaning. That would mean nobody, no matter how cruel, would have to atone for their sins. You could do anything; be anything. Without meaning, one could become a killer just for the sake of it, much like Meursault. That seemed, to me, like a vile ideology.

Little did I know, I was teetering on the edge of absurdism.

Although I’m still no expert on philosophical texts, this reading has taught me a lot. My thoughts on nihilists have changed quite drastically, though my opinions have not.

I first saw Meursault as unfeeling; emotionless and without care. However, his scenes with Marie, suggested quite the opposite. Despite the “meaningless of life” he often spoke about, the character portrayed emotions that often give life it's meaning. Although he did not love Marie in the traditional sense, he had felt something for her, though he may have just not shown it.

“I glanced at her, and noticed that she and Marie seemed to be getting on well together; laughing and chattering away. For the first time, perhaps, I seriously considered the possibility of my marrying her.”

Despite going into this with zero experience in reading philosophical or “classic” literature, I found myself grasping the themes very quickly. What especially intrigued me was Camus’s repeated use of heat and sun as a motif.

Meursault constantly expresses a great discomfort— almost hostility— toward the sun and its scorching haze. The hotter it is, the more irritable and irrational he becomes. The sun follows him throughout the story, from his mother’s funeral to the beach and through the window to his prison cell. To me, the sun represents the overwhelming weight of absurdity; the meaningless of life, human decisions, and the inevitability of death. It bores down on him in torment. His eyes become blurred (to reason), his body becomes exhausted (almost numb).

As the novel progresses, his previously vague descriptions of the sun transform. Longer, detailed, written almost poetically, his actions become increasingly absurd. This is significantly evident in the sixth chapter of the book when Meursault walks on the shoreline of the beach, seeking shelter from the intensifying heat beneath the shadow of a large rock. There, he finds the Arab, leaning against the rocks’ jagged edge in a relaxed, but suspecting state.

It struck me that all I had to do was to turn, walk away, and think no more about it. But the whole beach, pulsing with heat, was pressing on my back.

It’s clear to him that it’d be best to turn back and move on with his day. But the heat— the absurd— pushes him forward anyway.

It is somewhere after this quote that I discovered one of my favorites scenes in the book, which follows:

A shaft of light shot upward from the steel, and I felt as if a long, thin blade transfixed my forehead. At the same moment all the sweat that had accumulated in my eyebrows splashed down on my eyelids, covering them with a warm film of moisture. Beneath a veil of brine and tears my eyes were blinded; I was conscious only of the cymbals of the sun clashing on my skull, and, less distinctly, of the keen blade of light flashing up from the knife, scarring my eyelashes, and gouging into my eyeballs. 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. The trigger gave, and the smooth underbelly of the butt jogged my palm. And so, with that crisp, whipcrack sound, it all began. I shook off my sweat and the clinging veil of light. 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.

The build-up in this paragraph was intense in contrast to his earlier, detached descriptions. It felt utterly overwhelming, unrestricted, and raw, serving as the perfect depiction of letting go. In his case, I suspect it's the ever consuming emotions he’s repressed since the death of his mother.

This symbolism only continued to deepen in the courtroom scenes which followed not soon after.

The individuals around Meursault are constantly trying to avoid the sun’s influence. They use fans, they seek shade. If the pounding heat represents mortality, the repeated attempts to beat the heat demonstrate the way people try to escape the reality of death and meaninglessness— trying to rationalize a world that refuses to be rational. These mirror their attempts to find reason in Meursault’s actions. Meursault is the only one in the courtroom who refuses to resist. Sweaty and uncomfortable, he is forced to sit with the meaninglessness of what he has done, and he is comfortable with the inevitability of his death.

Part II: to be posted on july 25th!