It was almost three years to this date when I last read The Stranger (to impress a school teacher). I'd like to say my literary tastes have become slightly more refined, but even so, this book remains one of my favourites.
It's difficult to characterise Mersault succinctly. He is certainly not a defeatist; he will help others if he has no reason not to. Apathy would seem to be a more appropriate descriptor, but I don't think that does his character full justice. In any case, I think 'indifferent' is a better way of describing Mersault. It is not so much that he does not care, rather that he has no opinion on certain things. He is a rational man who is condemned for not playing the societal game.
The subtlety with which Camus builds the character of Mersault is something that I missed the first time reading it. Mersault experiences time pass in a very unusual way; he can lose whole days observing the movements of people on his street and doesn't seem to dwell on anything but the present. The motif of the heat is another thing that I didn't give due attention to. The Algerian heat radiates from the pages – you can almost feel yourself sweating along with Mersault and the other overdressed gentlemen. This sickening heat comes into play throughout the novel and in some sense precipitates the main events in the book. It's more powerful than the basic pathetic fallacy: it's a powerful image of the incomprehensible indifference of the universe: it is described as being '"inhuman and oppressive", and seems to dictate the behaviours of the characters. It is this universal indifference that Mersault finally understands in the last stage of the book, reaching a catharsis of sorts as he manages to make his view of the universe self-consistent.
MOTHER died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.
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with my spirit lamp and some bits of bread beside it. It occurred to me that somehow I’d got through another Sunday, that Mother now was buried, and tomorrow I’d be going back to work as usual. Really, nothing in my life had changed.
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When she laughed I wanted her again. A moment later she asked me if I loved her. I said that sort of question had no meaning, really; but I supposed I didn’t.
King 👑
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And just then it crossed my mind that one might fire, or not fire—and it would come to absolutely the same thing.
Mersault’s struggles with morality in an amoral – not immoral – universe.
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I’ve often thought that had I been compelled to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but gaze up at the patch of sky just overhead, I’d have got used to it by degrees.
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“I accuse the prisoner of behaving at his mother’s funeral in a way that showed he was already a criminal at heart.”
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They always came for one at dawn; that much I knew. So, really, all my nights were spent in waiting for that dawn. I have never liked being taken by surprise.
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From the dark horizon of my future a sort of slow, persistent breeze had been blowing toward me, all my life long, from the years that were to come. And on its way that breeze had leveled out all the ideas that people tried to foist on me in the equally unreal years I then was living through. What difference could they make to me, the deaths of others, or a mother’s love, or his God; or the way a man decides to live, the fate he thinks he chooses, since one and the same fate was bound to “choose” not only me but thousands of millions of privileged people who, like him, called themselves my brothers.
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