436
PARTISAN REVIEW
Though written in rudimentary French, many of the students' answers
seem remarkably eloquent:
Meursault was wrong to
kill
the Arab. But he didn't mean to. The death was al–
most an accident. He's not a criminal. He's only a man in a bad situation.
I think that the real monster, the person who cannot control his emotions, is
more the prosecutor than Meursault.
One must understand Meursault in order to realize that his actions were not his
choice but simply what happened.
Eighteen students out of twenty-two sympathized with Meursault, called
for "understanding" his situation, and defended his behavior as primarily
"different."
In
1990, in a graduate-undergraduate comparative literature course, I
asked for a synopsis of
The Stranger
and a brief commentary on the action.
Many of the students' responses tapped reserves of genuine passion:
Meursault is sentenced to be decapitated more for the person he is than for the
crime he has committed.
Meursault sees objectively and impersonally . .. and learns to live as Job did,
without judging life by human standards, [and thus] transcending anthropomor–
phism.
Reading Camus' The
Stranger
is a bit like witnessing a swimmer struggling against
an overpowering current. The swimmer, who maintains no pretenses and clings
to no false hopes, is challenged head-on by a society that prides itself on
"meaningful" conventions and order. ... Just as the Stranger yanks away the se–
curity blankets civilization tenaciously clings to, so does he [Camus] jolt the
reader to a new level of consciousness.
[The novel presents] the French judicial system's inability to cope with Meur–
sault, whose honesty leads him to be sentenced to death.
The tragic protagonist, Meursault, stoically narrates his existence misunderstood
by a judgmental French society.
These comments,
all
of which deserve careful attention, testify to a
misreading leading to moral blindness.
In
most of them the basic fact of
the murder is discounted, not mentioned, virtually overlooked. They as-
