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PARTISAN REVIEW
The
Stranger
offers us the inside narrative of virtually empty mental states
verging on autism.
Yet Camus depicts Meursault's animal consciousness being pushed
little by little toward self-awareness. The process begins after his mother's
burial, after Marie spends Saturday night with him, at the end of the long
idle Sunday that follows:
I'd intended to smoke another cigarette at my window, but the night had turned
rather chilly and I decided against it. As I was coming back after shutting the
window, I glanced at the mirror and saw reflected in it a corner of my table 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 that tomor–
row I'd be going back to work as usual. Really, nothing in my life had changed.
Meursault does not yet see
himself
in the mirror. He glimpses only a
few fragments of his environment. He seems to register for a moment the
utter vacancy of his life. A variety of scenes builds on this one. Meursault
vaguely senses that the robot-like woman in the restaurant, who scrupu–
lously writes out her own check with tip, embodies a caricature of
himself In prison he studies the reflection of his face in the tin mess kit
and realizes that he has been talking to himself In the courtroom a young
journalist gazes so hard at Meursault that Meursault has the impression of
"being scrutinized by myself." Later, while Meursault awaits execution,
the prison chaplain visits him and gazes at him constantly during a lengthy
and antagonistic conversation. Finally the chaplain's insistent words, ''I'm
on your side. I'll pray for you," provoke Meursault into seizing the chap–
lain. "Nothing is important," he shouts at him. "Life is absurd."
Meursault has glimpsed in the succession of reflections something that
inspires defiance in him, followed by "tender indifference" when he is
alone again. This sudden surge and fall of feeling occurs in the last three
pages of the novel. One could read the final sentence of The
Stranger
as an
ironic version of the execution scene at the end of
Billy Budd
(Billy shouts
"God bless Captain Vere!"), even as a parody of that scene:
In order to consummate everything and to feel less alone, I had only to wish that
there would be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they
would greet me with shouts of hatred.
But Camus didn't read
Billy Budd
until after he had written
The
Stranger.
Later in an essay written for an encyclopedia, he praised
