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PARTISAN REVIEW
Jean Gabin and here developed nationally and fictionally, and in the
work of Sartre as well-society's fear is understandable.
At the trial, when they are looking for character references in order
to mitigate the sentence, who of his friends can speak for Meursault?
"He was a man", says the restaurant keeper where he ate all his dinners.
"You all know, I suppose, what a man is?" But precisely nobody knows
what a man is and when they are confronted with one, they are hor–
rified. To be accepted, one must act like an idea of a man. It is absurd
-but, given the frail bases of civilization, it is also reasonable. Meur–
sault's girl whom he had agreed to marry though he has told her he did
not suppose he loved her-intelligent, he knew very well that love had
never touched him-wails that they have turned her words against him
when they were meant to be his succor. But her words themselves are
against him, and so is she. She, too, had wanted the lie, had wanted him
to
say
he loved her anyway and he wouldn't. "Marriage is a serious
matter," she had urged him. And he had answered simply, "No." So, at
the moment of pressure, his failure towards her helps condemn him-it
doesn't need the brutal exaggerations of the district attorney--even
though he was honest to fail and though she thought she had ac–
cepted his failure.
The beginning, the action of the story is told with an obstinate
dead level calm. Almost as withering to read about as it must have been
to live. And it is here that one questions the use of the first person. It
attacks the character of the prototype that he should consent to describe
himself as the victim of such a picayune regime. Without the vanity of
any illusion, he reports that he worked well, that he enjoyed a swim, that
he went to a movie, that he didn't like Sundays. The recital is alleviated
only by the little moments of positive well-being that penetrate to Meur–
sault and to the reader as a ray of watered sunshine might penetrate to
the dim pasturage of fishes at the bottom of the sea. And when he says
that the four pistol shots he fired into the body of the man he has al–
ready killed were like four short knocks on the door of misfortune, we
understand that he has not been at any time positively miserable; there–
fore his life has been good, as one might judge such things.
It is in prison that he begins to live more energetically. In prison
he remembers with moving directness the
en~
of days, the time of
aperitifs and long shadows, the qualities of certain street noises that he
would never experience again. The priest, a good priest-and all official–
dom in the book is as good as one could expect, conscientious and con–
vinced of the truth of its fabrications-comes to pray with him and he
says he hasn't time to think about God. He simply isn't interested in
Him. He wants to use his last hours remembering those few undramatic
times when life had been positively charged. The only future life he
could imagine, he tells the priest, is one in which he might remember
