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.)

---

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.