Absurdity as a Factor of Meursault's Indifference

Showalter, English Jr. The Stranger: Humanity and the Absurd. New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1996. Print.

Showalter’s view on The Stranger is that Camus tried to remain true to his vision of the absurd, the meaningless of existence, through to the very end and avoid the normal existentialist conclusion of the absurd as an excuse for a rise of faith and as to prove something. Showalter argues that Camus’s first-person narration was intended to be hard to distinguish exactly when and how Meursault speaks. This is a way to emphasize the strange inconsistency in Meursault, where the story he tells is in some extent of a story that is forced to be spoken. Showalter argues that the brief first-person narrative portrays its hero’s story as an unemotional confession, where the narration serves to highlight the intellectual disabilities within the character, Meursault. The narration dramatizes the problems of representation, communication, and interpretation and categorizes Meursault’s inability to give a convincing explanation as a failure of language, instead of a failure of the judicial system or the code of society. The brief first-person narrative, involving suppressed dialogue, enabled Camus to feel silent while writing The Stranger, and thus allowing him to create a fictional image of life within the absurd. Showalter argues that Camus “uses Meursault’s mind as the glass partition through which the world is viewed,” where the “technique makes the narrator a purely passive observer” (12). This technique’s effect is similar to the effects of observing someone in a phone booth from the outside, where all we see is the gestures, but do not hear the conversation. Showalter claims, “Such a person would appear absurd” (12).

Showalter’s suggestions of Meursault’s inconsistency and the difficulties of characterizing his exact speech in his telling of the story lead to different interpretations of the story along with different circumstances for who a reader will be able and willing to identify with. Showalter’s idea of the intentional, hard-to-distinguish narration and Meursault’s constant and strange inconsistency allow a reader different perspectives of viewing Meursault, where “indifferent” may not be the correct or only label. The argument involving the creation of a fictional image of life within the absurd through the use of a first-person narrative suggests the presence of a potential easiness for a reader to relate and identify with Meursault. Especially since this creation was enabled by Camus’s ability to theoretically feel silent and as a part of this life within the absurd while writing the novel. The argument of Meursault’s mind as a glass partition that creates a passive observing narrator recommends to a reader a different way of viewing, reading, and interpreting the narrative. The narrator is placing the reader in a perspective that reflects and easily relates to Meursault, which may help to analyze and measure the extent of sympathy a reader feels for Meursault. The effects of this technique suggest a reader to reevaluate first impressions of Meursault as indifferent and consider the absurdity as a factor of an “apparent” indifference.