Final Thoughts on The Stranger

The Stranger is a book that provoked a lot of thinking from me over a long period of time, which means that I have a ton of ideas that fit together in weird ways that might not make sense to anyone but me, but this is my attempt to kind of throw most of what I have at the wall and see what sticks. I know it's long and kind of messy but hopefully it'll still make some sense. (Also, I tried to post this yesterday, but somehow ended up deleting it instead, so this is kind of a hastily written version of the actual thing I wanted to say, which probably isn't gonna help. Sorry about that.)

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I guess a good place to start is with the idea that in The Stranger, there's an Oedipus-esque idea that human life is based on two basic things: death, and sex. Those are the two absolute events that have to happen as long as people are around. The argument that's presented in The Stranger is (roughly) that people build their personalities and societies around these events, by adding layers of meaning that add some sense of structure to them. Some of the first things human civilizations created were funerals and marriage rites. Every single society in history has had them in some way, right from the start, because of how important the concepts of death and sex are to human life. The problem that Mersault presents is that he's someone who doesn't place any outsized meaning in them, and just lives his life in a way that he lets them happen to him and then moves on.

The most obvious place to start is probably death, since that's what the novel is mostly concerned with. Obviously, in apparently randomly shooting the Arab, Mersault is completely flying in the face of everything people know about death. No one kills another person for no reason. They do it because they feel like they have to, in the case of Raymond (who wanted to shoot his ex-girlfriend's brother because he felt threatened), the court that sentences Mersault to death, or the woman in the newspaper clipping who murdered people to steal their money, or at least because they want to do it, in the case of some "actual" psychopathic murderer (to the extent that we can know they don't feel somehow forced to as well). That's because everyone, on some level, sees murder as a pretty big deal, because they see death as a pretty big deal. Partly that's because it's programmed into us (like Dezy brought up in his blog), and partly it's because most people really don't want to die and don't want to be reminded about it. There's a lot more to go into about the whole psychology of all that, and how it relates to Mersault's mother's funeral, but to cut it short it's pretty safe to say that there is a near-universal way to treat and consider death, and Mersault doesn't do a very good job pretending to fit in with it.

The more interesting side to look at, at least in my opinion is how Mersault fits into the second type of event that is inevitable for every life: sex. Specifically reproduction is what's necessary for life, but on a fundamental level our brains can't distinguish between reproductive sex and otherwise. In The Stranger, and in the minds of most of the people in it, the "sex" aspect of life is equated with other things, such as romantic and familial love. Mersault is unlucky in that he doesn't equate the "sex" half of life with love like people expect; instead, he equates it with basic pleasure. This freaks Marie out when he doesn't seem to place any importance in marriage, and it freaks the court out when he doesn't seem to love his mother. In fact, Mersault not appearing to care at the funeral is important to the trial because it shows conclusively that he cares about neither death or sex: the death aspect in that he doesn't act like he understands why people place so much importance to a ceremony about confronting mortality; the sex aspect in that he doesn't place enough respect in sex to abstain from it the day after what it supposed to be a humbling and terrifying experience; and both, in that he doesn't care that his mother is dead, which looks bad no matter who it is, but looks especially bad here because it proves that he didn't even love the one person everyone is supposed to love. From there, the court's logic goes that if he can't love his mother and mourn her loss, he can't care about anyone or anything -- which is why he was able to kill the Arab.

Mersault himself seems to agree with this interpretation when he says "But everyone knows life isn't worth living. Deep down I knew perfectly well that it doesn't much matter whether you die at thirty or seventy, since in either case other men and women will naturally go on living -- and for thousands of years." However, this quote doesn't represent the way Mersault actually thinks before the trial. It comes while he's in his cell but before he sees the chaplain, when he's at his most depressed. The first line, "Everyone knows life isn't worth living," seems especially to contradict Mersault's whole live-and-let-live philosophy. His whole thing is enjoying what there is to enjoy in life, and he's doing a good job of it in the beginning of the book. He never would have said anything like that before the trial. It's only after people like the magistrate try to convince him that life does have meaning that he decides that it doesn't. It seems like he's just arbitrarily pushing back against people who are trying to force themselves on him, but really the problem is that he has a different idea of what it means for life to have meaning. Specifically, he doesn't think that there's a meaning of life, he thinks there's meaning to life. In other words, the only thing that makes life worth living is living it. There's no absolute set of rules or "goal," which is the more common idea of how life can have meaning, but there's also no point not enjoying the world while you're there, meaning that there's no reason to be upset when you die, since ultimately it doesn't really mean anything. That idea is what Mersault lives by unconsciously before the trial, but he isn't able to articulate it when he's under intense pressure to conjure up a more traditional explanation for his behavior. The closest he gets is when he stammers that the sun made him kill the Arab, and that doesn't do a lot to help him get off. When he's sitting in his cell, all he can think of is the way the magistrate and the lawyers and the jury were all judging him for not believing that life has a meaning, and he becomes simultaneously angry at being judged and self-conscious about not fitting in. As a result, he feels pinned against the wall and just rejects the idea of there being any point in living at all (or at least, he tells himself he rejects it; he's still afraid of dying in the end).

Ironically, the chaplain is the person who makes Mersault finally crystalize his own position. By releasing all of his pent up anger and frustration on him, Mersault is able to come back to his senses and realize that he does see a reason to live, but that it's very different from what the chaplain or the magistrate want that reason to be. In a strange way, the last few pages, when Mersault finally accepts his own death, are some of the most life-affirming in the whole novel. When he finally manages to articulate why he lived the way he did, it seems to be just as legitimate as any other way to live. If we all have to be born and we all have to die, it doesn't matter much what happens in between, but you might as well enjoy it. Even the very end of the book, where Mersault says he hopes that the people watching his execution greet him "with cries of hate" makes sense in this context. He hopes that, if nothing else, the people watching get some satisfaction out of seeing him dead; after all, if we're all sentenced to end our lives the same way, you might as well end that sentence with an exclamation mark instead of a period.

Raymond vs. Mersault

Now that we're done reading and I had some time to gather my thoughts, one of the things I thought was the most interesting in The Stranger was the divide between Raymond and Mersault, and the way people responded to their friendship. It's pretty clear that Raymond is considered a "criminal" - at the very best, he beats his girlfriend and considers shooting her brother. From the very start we know that Raymond is not an upstanding citizen who can be trusted to contribute positively to society as a whole. On the other hand, Mersault is educated, a committed worker, and apparently pretty fun to be around. He's not necessarily "normal," but he seems on the outside to be a fairly decent person. Until the murder, he has presumably never harmed anyone directly.

The thing is, Raymond actually fits a lot better into society than Mersault does. Raymond has a place, and he fills it gladly. He's about as criminal as someone can be. Some people might say that people like him cause or express the problems of society,  but no one doubts that they are very much a part of society. Even if Raymond lacks some of the morals people are expected to hold, in that he has no problem beating women or shooting people, he's still driven by his own morals and emotions, maybe more than any character in the book - his morals say that cheating is bad, so when he suspects his girlfriend is cheating on him he gets angry, so he goes out of his way to punish her, even though he risks jail for it. In a way he's just standing up for what he believes, the same way the court is standing up for what it believes in executing Mersault. Raymond could even be seen as a metaphor for the court, as someone who inflicts violent punishment on someone who he suspects may be breaking his personal rules.

Mersault doesn't take anything as seriously as Raymond takes infidelity, but it would still be inaccurate to say he doesn't have any morals. He doesn't like to hurt others, which we see in the way he's afraid of making them uncomfortable, and that includes shooting Arabs - he talks Raymond down when he wants to commit the murder himself. Even if that feeling only exists because hurting others makes him feel bad and not because he objectively thinks hurting others is bad, it's pretty clear that Mersault doesn't want to kill anyone, it's just something that happens in a time where he can't control himself. In a way I see it as similar to the impulses we all have to stand up and yell something at an inappropriate time, or jump off a tall building, or swerve into the wrong lane while driving. People have impulses to hurt themselves or others all the time and sometimes it can feel like you need all of your self-control not to do it. When Mersault is on the beach, everything conspires in a way to make him lose that self-control, and pull the trigger. It's impossible to know exactly what was going through Mersault's head when he pulled the trigger, but it seems pretty likely it wasn't "Good. That'll show him."  The court doesn't see that though; they just see someone who committed a murder because of an absolute lack of fundamental moral understanding.

The court's response to Mersault is related to why a book like The Metamorphosis is funny. At it's most basic, humor comes from seeing something that makes you uncomfortable, but feeling safely removed from it. The idea of someone spontaneously transforming into a bug is funny as long as we know it's happening in a book, but if that happened to someone you knew, you probably wouldn't think it was funny. It would probably call everything you thought you knew into question. To the people at Mersault's trial, seeing someone who doesn't care about their mother's death, doesn't believe in God, and doesn't show remorse for murder, is like seeing someone turn into a bug in front of them. He makes them extremely uncomfortable because he calls into question the absolute nature of some of our most basic societal values. This is especially frightening to someone like a judge, who makes a living off of upholding absolute societal values, but it makes the ordinary people of the jury uncomfortable too.

The question is whether or not the people have the right to punish Mersault more because he makes them uncomfortable. It might seem ridiculous that they can condemn him to death because he makes them feel a bit icky, but in a way it makes sense. From their point of view, just having someone like Mersault around who doesn't care about his mother's death or believe in God threatens to make other people question why they do believe in those things. That might be especially dangerous when it comes to criminals like Raymond. In the court's view of things, the only thing that keeps someone like him from running amok and tearing society apart is him thinking about what his mother would think, or what Jesus would do. If a belief in God isn't enough to stop people from murdering (and according to the magistrate, all the murderers he's seen before Mersault do believe in God), who's to say what they would do if they didn't even have that? And to make matters worse, if Mersault isn't executed, where will he go? To a maximum security prison - where he'll be around no one but the kind of people the court really doesn't want him to meet. You can question whether or not letting Mersault live would actually cause anyone to adopt his nihilism without his any of his benign nature, but from a certain point of view, keeping him out of society does makes sense. Of course, the people on the jury probably aren't just worried about the destruction Mersault's beliefs might cause - more likely, they just think the way he makes them uncomfortable is reason enough to kill him, but it's more interesting to think that they might have a better reason for their sentence.