The Stranger - Excerpts

• “Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: “Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.” That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.” - Meursault Ch. 1.1

  • The opening line above introduces Meursault’s indifference and emotional detachment, which are his defining characteristics.
  • The tone itself. Meursault seems to put more emphasis on the day of his mother’s death rather than the death itself

• “I saw them more clearly than I had ever seen anyone, and not one detail of their faces or their clothes escaped me. But I couldn’t hear them, and it was hard for me to believe they really existed.” - Meursault Ch. 1.1

  • Meursault is very observant about what happens in his surroundings. He focuses on describing the physical rather than the sentimental.
  • As he later remarks in Ch. 2.1, his physical needs get in the way of his feelings.
  • Motivation: Meursault does things simply because he thinks they would be pleasurable. He acts on impulse such as when he and his friend Immanuel hop on a fire truck.
  • Meursault values the sensations that he feels in his surroundings. This is especially true with regards to the sun.

• “On their way out, and much to my surprise, they all shook my hand as if that night during which we hadn’t exchanged as much as a single word had somehow brought us closer together.” - Meursault Ch. 1.1

  • Meursault is socially and emotionally detached. A literal Stranger. Notice he describes everything in a detached tone

• ""If you go slowly, you risk getting sunstroke. But if you go too fast, you work up a sweat and then catch a chill inside the church.” She was right, there was no way out.” - Meursault Ch. 1.1

  • Metaphor: The inevitability of death, but more than that the inability to escape from society’s hold, which is relevant for Meursault’s story.

• “It occurred to me that anyway one more Sunday was over, that Maman was buried now, that I was going back to work, and that, really, nothing had changed.” - Meursault Ch. 1.2

  • Meursault’s response to his mother’s death is not sadness, but guilt and indifference He even mistakes the funeral (that happened Yesterday) as the day she died.
  • In fact, Meursault doesn’t seem to be reflecting at all about his mother’s death, which would be the expected response.
  • Sundays are unremarkable for Meursault because they are unstructured. There is no routine followed.
  • He lives a boring life, yet he himself seems content with it.

• “I tried my best to please Raymond because I didn’t have any reason not to please him” - Meursault Ch. 1.3

  • Meursault only engages in conversation because he has no reason not to. He simply does things because he has no reason not to.
  • In this case, he engages with Raymond, a violent pimp who beat up his mistress. Meursault even does him a favor by writing a letter that would eventually end up implicating Meursault of the Arab’s murder.
    • This is in stark contrast with Meursault’s honest self.

• “You’re young, and it seems to me it’s the kind of life that would appeal to you.” I said yes but that really it was all the same to me.

  Then he asked me if I wasn’t interested in a change of life. I said that people never change their lives, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn’t dissatisfied with mine here at all.

  He looked upset and told me that I never gave him a straight answer, that I had no ambition, and that that was disastrous in business.

  So I went back to work. I would rather not have upset him, but I couldn’t see any reason to change my life. Looking back on it, I wasn’t unhappy. When I was a student, I had lots of ambitions like that. But when I had to give up my studies I learned very quickly that none of it really mattered.” -Meursault Ch. 1.5

  • It is this line of reasoning which unnerves the people around him. The excerpt and the one with Marie that follows highlights this.

• “Then (Marie) wanted to know if I loved her. I answered the same way I had the last time, that it didn’t mean anything but that I probably didn’t love her.

  “So why marry me, then?” she said. I explained to her that it didn’t really matter and that if she wanted to, we could get married. Besides, she was the one who was doing the asking and all I was saying was yes.

  Then she pointed out that marriage was a serious thing. I said, “No.” She stopped talking for a minute and looked at me without saying anything.

  Then she spoke. She just wanted to know if I would have accepted the same proposal from another woman, with whom I was involved in the same way. I said, “Sure.”

  Then she said she wondered if she loved me, and there was no way I could know about that.” - Meursault Ch. 1.5

  • Meursault is honest about his feelings towards others.

• I went with him as far as the bungalow, and as he climbed the wooden steps, I just stood there at the bottom, my head ringing from the sun, unable to face the effort it would take to climb the wooden staircase and face the women again. But the heat was so intense that it was just as bad standing still in the blinding stream falling from the sky. To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing. A minute later I turned back toward the beach and started walking

  It occurred to me that all I had to do was turn around and that would be the end of it. But the whole beach, throbbing in the sun, was pressing on my back. I took a few steps toward the spring. The Arab didn’t move. Besides, he was still pretty far away. Maybe it was the shadows on his face, but it looked like he was laughing.

  I waited. The sun was starting to burn my cheeks, and I could feel drops of sweat gathering in my eyebrows. The sun was the same as it had been the day I’d buried Maman, and like then, my forehead especially was hurting me, all the veins in it throbbing under the skin. It was this burning, which I couldn’t stand anymore, that made me move forward.

  I knew that it was stupid, that I wouldn’t get the sun off me by stepping forward. But I took a step, one step, forward. And this time, without getting up, the Arab drew his knife and held it up to me in the sun. The light shot off the steel and it was like a long flashing blade cutting at my forehead. At the same instant the sweat in my eyebrows dripped down over my eyelids all at once and covered them with a warm, thick film.

  My eyes were blinded behind the curtain of tears and salt. All I could feel were the cymbals of sunlight crashing on my forehead and, indistinctly, the dazzling spear flying up from the knife in front of me. The scorching blade slashed at my eyelashes and stabbed at my stinging eyes. That’s when everything began to reel. The sea carried up a thick, fiery breath. It seemed to me as if the sky split open from one end to the other to rain down fire.

  My whole being tensed and I squeezed my hand around the revolver. The trigger gave; I felt the smooth underside of the butt; and there, in that noise, sharp and deafening at the same time, is where it all started. I shook off the sweat and sun. I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I’d been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace.

  And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness. - Meursault Ch. 1.6

  • The above describes the “climactic moment” where Meursault shoots the Arab. For context, the chapter started with Meursault in a bad mood because the police did not listen to his testimony regarding Raymond and his girlfriend.
    • Irony: Meursault is dressed like he is in mourning, even though he didn’t do such a thing for his mother’s funeral.
  • Irony: The Sun has thus far been depicted as something Meursault likes, yet now he finds it too overpowering, which eventually moves him to kill the Arab.

• “I probably did love Maman, but that didn’t mean anything. At one time or another all normal people have wished their loved ones were dead.” - Meursault Ch. 2.1

  • In Meursault’s mind, it is absurd how to unrelated events (i.e., the matter of his Mother’s death and the murder of the Arab) have any bearing with each other.
  • Yet in the eyes of the law, the former can be set as precedent to establish Meursault as cold-hearted
  • This is framed in such a way that Meursault is being punished for being honest with himself rather than “playing the game” Yet, Meursault has no interest in playing the game, and this comes back to bite him.
  • The realization, then, is that either way the Other punishes us regardless if we choose to lie or tell the truth.

• “I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else. But really there wasn’t much point, and I gave up the idea out of laziness.” - Meursault Ch. 2.1

• “It was one of Maman’s ideas, and she often repeated it, that after a while you could get used to anything.” - Meursault Ch. 2.2

  • Spoken in the context of Meursault being imprisoned. He eventually gets accustomed to life behind bars without the pleasures he enjoyed as a free man.

• “I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored. In a way, it was an advantage.” - Meursault Ch. 2.2

  • He found solace in thinking and reminiscing to stave off the boredom.

• “For the first time in years I had this stupid urge to cry, because I could feel how much all these people hated me.” - Meursault Ch. 2.3

  • For context this was because Meursault realized the trial would be focused on him not grieving during his mother’s funeral.
  • Contrast: The sun’s heat in this chapter parallels that of Meursault’s annoyance at the proceedings. This is especially since he knew they were only going to bring up his Mother.

• “Come now, is my client on trial for burying his mother or for killing a man?” - Meursault's Lawyer Ch. 2.3

  • It’s funny how the defense could have simply argued that Meursault panicked on seeing the Arab’s knife, yet he too is concerned with arguing about Meursault’s soul

• “My fate was being decided without anyone so much as asking my opinion.” - Meursault Ch. 2.4

• “Fumbling a little with my words and realizing how ridiculous I sounded, I blurted out that it was because of the sun.” - Meursault Ch. 2.4

• “Even there, in that home where lives were fading out, evening was a kind of wistful respite. So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again. Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her. And I felt ready to live it all again too.

  As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself-so like a brother, really-! felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again.

  For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.” - Meursault Ch. 2.5

  • Meursault ultimately laments how his freedom has been stifled due to the unjust verdict of the Other.
  • Meursault must live with the inevitability of Death, that any day he may be beheaded. He holds out hope yet also dismisses this hope as pointless since Death is inevitable anyway.
  • His realization is to become the Absurdist man—to live and appreciate life, even if it is full of suffering and even now that he has nothing.
  • “I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn’t done that. I hadn’t done this thing but I had done another. And so?” - Meursault Ch. 2.5