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.

Proposal of Two Meursaults

Solomon, Robert C. “Is Meursault a Stranger to the Truth?” Readings on The Stranger. Ed. Derek C. Maus. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, Inc., 2001. 61-75. Print

Solomon addresses his idea of Meursault as an existentialist man who neither lies nor tells the truth, because he cannot reach the level of consciousness where truth and falsity can be clarified. As the narrator of the novel, Meursault does not judge; he describes and observes. Solomon expresses how Meursault’s “indifference is a falsification of emotions” (75). He cannot be true to his feelings, not only because he does not know and understand them, but because he cannot even have them without making judgments. He is minimally self-conscious with only few thoughts in which he does not reflect on. Meursault’s “true feelings” are an emotionally stripped representation of human experience. Solomon states that “Meursault, for the first part of the novel, is an ideal sartrian pre-reflective consciousness, pure experience without reflection, always other than, but also nothing other than what he is conscious of at the moment” (64). Solomon argues that it is the “first-person standpoint that Camus allows the Kantian or Husserlian Ego to report on the utter blandness of Meursault’s pre-reflective consciousness as it matter-of-factly describes his world” (65). The problem is that the narrator of part I “cannot consistently be the same Meursault who is unreflectively experiencing. It must be another Meursault, a reflective Meursault.” (65). Solomon claims that the “trueness” for the reflective narrator would appear to be the bare, un-interpreted, and comment-less reporting of human experience of the pre-reflective Meursault’s. Also, he explains how there are “gaps in the narration where feelings ought to be in exactly the same way that there is an abyss where Meursault’s ‘soul’ ought to be” (67). Thus, Solomon justifies that Meursault of part I is an impossible character because he is the reflective narrator and the un-reflective bearer of experience.

Solomon’s idea about two Meursaults, the pre-reflective character and the reflective narrator, is relevant because it allows a reader to think about and categorize Meursault’s indifference as the result of two Meursaults in the narration, instead of completely labeling Meursault as inwardly indifferent. The reader could rationalize his indifference by the result of the complications that arise between Meursault’s existential role as character and inability to interpret and reflect on events and his role as narrator to be reflective. Solomon portrays the narrator of part I as “another Meursault,” which would enhance and highlight Meursault’s indifference and make it easily apparent for a reader, who wasn’t aware of “another Meursault” as the narrator. Another relevance of Solomon’s argument involves how the “gaps in narration” allow a reader to consider the possibility that these gaps are created by the effect of a pre-reflective character of Meursault as the reflective narrator. Even though these gaps may be what initially drives a reader to consider Meursault as indifferent, Solomon’s view on the gaps in the narration allow the reader to contemplate and analyze these gaps as the results from the complications between roles and the crossing of paths of the two Meursaults.