the habit of being

The Beauty and The Stranger
A character study of sorts, I wrote this for my English class, back in January. My teacher gave me a 91 on it. I find literary criticism sickening, do remember fateful words :I hate my English class, I really do, and I think literary criticism is disrespectful, even if I am the best, even if I am her “top student.” I hate it; I sit through those seminars wanting to be anywhere else, wanting to do math, wanting to read. I never want to write another essay as long as I live, and I told Jennifer to shoot me if I ever consider majoring in English. . . . You can tell, I suppose.

(You see February is hideous, and almost over, thank God.)

In his novella, The Stranger, French philosopher Albert Camus creates for his reader a protagonist at once immensely difficult to understand and unbelievably compelling. Patrice Meursault is indeed a stranger not only to the reader but to all the other characters in the story, none of whom come close to understanding him, and all of whom are, to varying degrees, afraid of him. Here is a man who is obviously quite intelligent and logical, who is honest almost to a fault, yet who seems at times entirely indecisive and apathetic about the path he will follow. Here is a man who is at once both completely confident in his understanding of the world he lives in and rather worried about how others will perceive him in uncomfortable situations. He is quiet, skeptical, and extremely in tune with his external environment. Though he can spend hours contemplating the scene outside his bedroom window, though he examines details with an almost superhuman specificity, and though he seems to see things that no one else can, he comes off to most of his peers as completely unfeeling and cold. The reader must ask himself again and again what must go on in the mind of this man who can attend the burial of his own mother with shedding a single tear, who can kill a man he did not even know without any obvious reason. In revealing to his readers even the smallest glimpse of this strange man�s inner struggle, Camus teaches them to examine not only the way in which they judge one another, but also the way in which they see the world.

In the building inhabited by our odd protagonist at the beginning of the story, lived a man for whom today’s animal rights activists would have had a lovely lynching party. The man’s dog, already plagued by a hideous skin disease, was subject to frequent beatings and all the emotional damage one might expect to accompany being called a bastard and lousy mongrel by the hand that fills the food dish. Monsieur Meursault, when asked by his friend Raymond, the notorious neighborhood warehouseman-pimp, whether he was disgusted by the way the old grump Salamano treated his mangy spaniel, answered simply in the negative. Meursault’s response here may hold an important key to his personality. Camus gives his reader many clues that Salamano and his spaniel are, in addition to being interesting comic characters, also players in an important metaphor. Salamano sees his dog not only as the pathetic brute he is, but also as a symbol of his life’s misfortunes. In beating and cursing his dog, the old man complains of all the brutal injustices of the world in which he is forced to live. The dog represents not only these sorrows, but also the cause of them, in this case, Salamano himself, who creates his own misery. When Salamano speaks of his dog’s main problem, old age, it is obvious that he is speaking of himself; later, when Meursault shakes the sad character’s hand, he mentions that he could feel the scales, bringing to mind the sores covering the spaniel’s body. Cooped up in his little apartment, quite alone with his dog after the death of his wife, left to think always of worries and fears, Salamano too had become ugly and sick.

Though Salamano hated his earthy troubles, kicked and mistreated his dog, he had become used to him and was terrified to leave him. When the spaniel was lost, Salamano, for the sake of pride, pretended to be glad to be rid of the burden. To Meursault alone, however, did he confess his attachment to the pet he’d had for so many years. In effect, his life, though hard, was precious to him, and he could not stand the thought of leaving it. Meursault seemed to understand all this, showing an insight into human nature deeper than that of the other characters in the book. Most importantly, he did not judge the old man harshly for mistreating his dog, just as he did not despise Raymond for the type of life he chose to lead. Meursault’s reluctance to pass judgment on anyone and his inability to blindly accept the judgments of society are aspects of his character of which the reader must be aware in order to fully appreciate the story. The irony of his views, when contrasted with the treatment he receives from his peers during his later trial, is striking.

One will catch a glimpse of Meursault’s mentality in carefully scrutinizing his relationship with Marie, his lover. Though he is obviously quite fond of the girl and enjoys the pleasures of a sexual relationship with her, he refuses to lead her on. He will not give her reason to think he harbors feelings for her of which he is not himself sure. When asked by her whether he loved her, he gave the unexpected response that to him “the sort of question had no meaning really” and that he “supposed [he] didn’t” (585). It would appear that he included in his list of skepticisms a disbelief in love. Such a thing may seem rather impossible, but left-brained people might explain the feeling as a chemical reaction, something scientific conjured up by the body to encourage reproduction. In any case, love was of little significance to Monsieur Meursault, and he made no attempt to hide this fact from his significant other. He responds quite similarly to her proposition of marriage, saying he finds the matter to be of little importance, but agreeing to go along with it if it would make her happy. What stands out in all this is how honestly and unaffectedly he says all these things, knowing the kind of reaction she could have to them.

Lifestyle also seems a matter of little importance to Camus’ protagonist. When asked by his boss if he would like to take a post in Paris, he responded in a completely indifferent manner, saying that “one never changed his way of life; one life was as good as another, and [his] present one suited [him] just fine” (589). Life for Meursault was a completely internal concept. He probably would have agreed with the old motto “wherever you go, there you are.” In his life, he seemed to strive for a certain degree of insensitivity to the outside world. This type of unaffectedness is shown most completely in the behavior of the “little robot woman” with whom Meursault dined one night in the first part of the story. She never spoke a word to him, appeared to be completely indifferent to his presence at her table, and yet she, unlike so many others on the story, seemed to inspire in him a genuine interest. He even went so far as to follow her as she left the restaurant. When the “robot woman” reappears later in the book, to witness Meursault’s trial, she is the only one of his acquaintances who appears to really see him for what he is. It is obvious the Camus meant to imply some sort of bond between the two. This bond consists of their mutual lack of dependence upon others.

While Meursault was for the most part unaffected by the actions, not to mention the opinions, of the people around him, he was rather decidedly affected by his physical environment. Throughout the novella, the main character makes reference to the color of the sky, the temperature of the air, the general atmosphere of the place in which the scene is taking place. At every important event of the story, from the funeral that opens it to the murder on the beach that it is its climax to the trial that marks the beginning of the ending, Meursault’s behavior is affected by the conditions of his environment. The sun, bearing down on the shoulders of Meursault as he takes his fateful steps along the beach toward the Arab who will become his victim, seems to take on the role of another character in the story.

The sun and extreme heat so well described in this climactic scene actually represent many factors in the struggle of Camus’ existential hero. The sun seems to drive him to commit his crime; it embodies a sense of the inevitable, as it pulls him toward his fate. The weight of the heat on his back mimics also the weight of the world on his shoulders. The good existentialist will recognize that Meursault is, single-handedly, responsible not only for the whole of his own fate but also for the fates of all those with whom he has ever come into contact. Simply by being present in their lives, Meursault has irreversibly changed the fates of Marie, Salamano, Raymond, the “little robot woman,” and his mother! He was conscious only of this unbearable weight, this terrible heat, as he walked along that beach. The murder never had anything to do with the Arab. Meursault had nothing against that man. “[His] impression was that the incident [between the Arab and Raymond] was closed, and [he] hadn’t given it a single thought” (600). What he wanted was the water from the stream in front of which the Arab was standing. He wanted “anything to be rid of the glare, the sight of women in tears, the strain and the effort � and to retrieve the pool of shadow by the rock and its cool silence” (600). For this, Camus’ protagonist, his stranger, killed a man.

It is through the sameness of the heat, the sameness of the weight felt by Meursault at the time, that the murder of the Arab and the funeral of his mother are related. At both times, he became disconnected from his actions by an extreme preoccupation with the sun, which was, of course, much more to him than a simple star in the sky. Following the killing and Meursault’s imprisonment, the two events became related in the eyes of everyone else in the story as well, as Meursault�s conduct toward his mother both before and after her death became a key factor in his prosecution. Meursault seemed to view the death of his mother at the beginning of the tale through the eyes of logic: he simply accepted it and saw no reason why he should trouble himself over the fact. Contrasted with the feelings of the young prisoner who stared passionately through the bars into the eyes of his own grieving mother as Meursault struggled to have a conversation with Marie, Meursault’s feelings toward his deceased mother do indeed seem cold.

While his lawyer and his questioners troubled with the question of his morality, Meursault underwent what could be described as a spiritual awakening in prison. He came to appreciate the liberty that he had lost. He went over in his head all the lovely details he had stockpiled through all his years of freedom. “[He] learned that even after a single day�s experience of the outside world a man could easily live a hundred years in prison” (612). Yet at the same time he began to accept his fate as a prisoner, observing that “had [he] been compelled to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but gaze up at the patch of sky directly overheard, [he'd] have gotten used to it by degrees” (610). And so, in prison, he began to lose his sense a time, awaiting the judgment to come.

When the trial finally arrived, it could only be described as ridiculous when critiqued from a legal standpoint. It was as if instead of being tried for murder, Monsieur Meursault stood in judgment for every aspect of his personality, from his intelligence to his disbelief in God. By this representation of the legal system, Camus points out man’s propensity to judge and to condemn those around him who are in any way different or strange. It matters not that the ones who are not ordinary may in effect be extraordinary, beautiful, genius. “To be great is to be misunderstood,” says Emerson, and how well this point is illustrated in Camus’ novella. The prosecuting attorney’s interpretation of the events leading up to Meursault’s killing the Arab is so far from accurate that the reader cannot help feeling sympathetic toward the defendant, who is being condemned to death by men who simply do not understand him. These people judging Meursault cannot possibly grasp the significance of his act, for they are guided by a completely different set of standards. The reader himself, who also sits in judgment of this character, in all likelihood has realized by this point that he does not understand either, though he has a much more complete knowledge of what was going on in the protagonist�s mind during his mother’s funeral and during his walk on the beach preceding the killing. Meursault is a stranger to his own acquaintances, because they cannot know what is going on in his head, and so are all men strangers, even among close friends.

In regard to Meursault, the reader must ask himself “Is he not beautiful?” as he reads, “I have never been able to regret anything in all my life. I’ve always been far too much absorbed in the present moment, of the immediate future, to think back” (626). “Is this not striking, in all its oddness”, asks the reader, with no one to answer him. Certainly, this man is guilty of murder, but he his being accused not of that, but of having no soul. “Who are they to judge Meursault’s morality?” one might ask, and in the same breath, “who am I to judge it?” As these men in the courtroom think him cold, unfeeling, and criminal to the very core, Meursault remembers. He has “memories of a life which was no longer [his] and had once provided [him] with the surest, humblest pleasures: warm smells of summer, [his] favorite streets, the sky at evening, Marie’s dresses and her laugh” (629). It is all so very ironic, and he sits there surrounded by people who detest him. Only when Meursault is sentenced to public decapitation does their hatred subside.

After the trial ended, Meursault found his hollow tree, a prison cell in which “lying on [his] back, [he could] see the sky, and there [was] nothing else to see” (631). He waited for death in isolation, feeling all the sensations he was accused of not having the ability to know: fear, hope, despair, perhaps even love for his mother, as he remembered things she told him as a boy. Through pondering the guillotine, thinking so often of death, he became more aware of that which he had always known: none of it mattered; it was all so very simple and amounted to little, these events, his so-called life. In this realization he found contentment. Still, the opiate of the masses was thrust in his face by the prison chaplain, who wanted to lessen his final sufferings. Meursault felt nothing but disgust with religion, as with all ideas society had attempted to force into his mind. All that mattered to him was that of which he could be certain, that which he had come to realize himself, through years of study, of life. All that mattered was the very fact that nothing mattered, not “the deaths of others, or a mother’s love, or God” (639). After this final enlightenment, Meursault felt that the weight which had once fell so heavily on his shoulders was gone, that his life, now light, had begun again.

Some readers may find this short novel depressing, but one can only marvel at the genius Camus displayed in capturing beauty in such an unexpected way. Meursault may not be an immediately likeable character, but he is without a doubt a masterfully created one. In bringing this incredible man to life in The Stranger, Camus has crafted a story that will inspire genuine thought in readers for years to come. One really cannot ask for more.