in which non-conformity is a greater crime than murder. (8/10)
this is the second book i'm reading that i've associated with limbus company characters, who are based on their literary sources :0 the first one was hell screen!! i'll try to read these books before any of their in-game chapters release in the future... but no promises!!
anyway!! enough about me nerding out!! i will outright say now that i'm no camus scholar. i don't know about his works apart from this, or his absurdist essays. i'm not even that good at philosophy, so when reading discussions about this book online, i found myself a bit lost at all these terms being thrown around... i knew them on a surface level, of course, but nothing deeper. as a side note, i am pretty interested in learning more about it... it's one of those things i have in the back of my mind BUT given how i'm interested in 900 other things, i can't guarantee i'll be able to dedicate more time into the idea.
please be nice to me, i'm not smart. (i can comfortably say this to no one, because i am in my own bubble hehehehehe)
... ANYWAY. i will say that albert camus' the stranger is a short and very straightforward read, plotwise. mother dies, meursault manages to keep living anyhow and even finds love (questionable). he then makes friends with the wrong guy, inevitably ending up in a heap of trouble because of it. the first part moved a little too slow for my liking, but it sets up necessary context for the second part and introduces us to the workings of meursault's mind.
meursault is a strange case of a man. he doesn't seem to hold too much sentimental value for anything in his life, but at the same time we see glimpses of him contradicting himself. we see him tell marie that he supposed he didn't love her (finding meaninglessness in the question), and yet we have moments where he yearns to kiss her whenever she laughs. and he did seem interested about her life—it's just that it never really registers to him to bring it up around her.
“When she laughed I wanted her again. A moment later she asked me if I loved her. I said that sort of question had no meaning, really; but I supposed I didn't. She looked sad for a bit, but when we were getting our lunch ready she brightened up and started laughing, and when she laughs I always want to kiss her.”
he also finds some sentimentality in his home—in the comfort of every day sounds. there's a scene in the first part of the book where he sits by his balcony just to smoke and admire the mundanity of day–to–day life, but there's another in the second part that i really adore. when all of that mundanity is taken away from him, and he starts to long for it again after so long:
“And, sitting in the darkness of my moving cell, I recognized, echoing in my tired brain, all the characteristic sounds of a town I'd loved, and of a certain hour of the day which I had always particukarly enjoyed. (...) —all these sounds made my return to prison like a blind manʼs journey along a route whose every inch he knows by heart.”
and mind you, this is after he has been accused of being a heartless, unfeeling monster. to which, i REALLY disagree with. and slightly disagree, to anyone who says meursault is purely a nihilist. while i do see their point, i wouldn't say he's "empty", just extremely passive? he doesn't think and feel in a way that's conventional. he comes off as unintentionally cold, when really, it's just that he wouldn't rather dwell on unnecessary things. the kind of person who would rather bother themselves about the present rather than the future or past—as he believes existence simply is. as much as he believes that his crime just happened to have happened in the given circumstance, plain and simple (we do see his preference for the simple a lot). there's even another contradiction to be made with the crime's "simplicity", as ironically, the descriptions of the blaring sun and the suffocating heat were extremely detailed, tense, and drawn out!!
in a way, his mannerisms make him a bit of an outcast. heʼs THE stranger, if you will. and yet, he thinks himself thinking thoughts that any normal person would think (not usually the case). meursault is a man of many, many contradictions... isn't that one of the scopes of absurdism? i don't know!! this book is really more of an exploration of meursault's character and culminates into this huge, cathartic moment for him where he snaps at the prison chaplain who kept pushing the idea of religion onto meursault, questioning his way of life because the priest just canʼt believe the fact that someone would refuse his help, when so many before him have surrendered. to have someone like meursault be so different and hardened. meursault, on the other hand, is having none of it. it's a moment i repeatedly go back to, because it's just very good.
“Then, I donʼt know how it was, but something seemed to break inside me, and I started yelling at the top of my voice. I hurled insults at him, I told him not to waste his rotten prayers on me; it was better to burn than to disappear.”
as harsh as this sounds, you have to understand that the prison chaplain priest guy was being very, VERY insistent since day one. and when he found out for the first time he cannot convert him, he calls meursault the antichrist. if anything, i'd argue that the man was only doing this out of obligation to his god, and with the way he's distressed and agitated when trying to convince meursault, i'd even go as far as to think that he probably doesn't hold respect for him as much as the next person. and so, by putting up this holier–than–thou act, the prison chaplain betrays himself. all while meursault knows that death is certain, even if he went out of his way to change the small details in his life—and because he knows how futile his situation is, even if he did find some yearning to be given another chance, he doesn't try to bend himself just to be granted it. we even see glimpses of this kind of behavior in his interactions with his lawyer, by the way. he'd rather state the crime in a plain manner without having to add frills to it, and this agitates the lawyer. the kawyer doesn't understand the type of person meursault is. anyway back to the priest and meursault, love this quote:
“It might look as if my hands were empty. Actually, I was sure of myself, sure about everything, far surer than he; sure of my present life and of the death that was coming. That, no doubt, was all I had; but at least that certainty was something I could get my teeth into—just as it has got its teeth into me.”
... i find that this is only about a quarter of what i wanted to say about this book. i don't structure these things and just fire off my thoughts willy nilly... like journaling, i guess? sometimes you write things down without overthinking it. i find that when i talk about media and what i like out of it, it turns into a bit of a mess...
let's talk about meursault's court proceedings!
... it was VERY hard to read through it. he's repeatedly othered, and there was almost more emphasis on his character than the actual crime that took place. more emphasis on whether or not he cried at his mother's funeral, which took up 90% of the prosecution's argument!! GOD, i disliked it sooo much!! they treat him like he's inhuman, and meursault struggles to comprehend why he's so outcasted. maybe it's what he gets for his own crime, but it's just insane to me that the crime in question was more of an afterthought. if they really gave a shit about psychology, the court would have tried to investigate WHY meursault's relation to his mother was so disconnected... it's like the whole court proceeding was just some way to find an excuse to pin the blame on him, rather than an investigation. so aggravating... and really tragic, i suppose.
but in the end, like much of meursault's life, it was all unimportant. he'll march to the guillotine regardless. and it leaves such a hopeless feeling, an empty pit hollowed out in my chest. what does it matter if they tried picking apart his childhood to see why he's the way he is? while it was something part of me was EXPECTING to see, i feel as though it wouldn't make much difference.
this book really sends you such a heavy weight of hopelessness. that weight is only lifted by the time meursault snaps, shows an emotion that isn't just his usual passiveness he uses to make himself agreeable around other people. in a way it's his victory: he embraces his own absurdity and feels freer than any liberated man. he's as freely privileged in life and as miserably convicted in death as everyone else, so he believes. he'd rather run straight into inescapable death making the pointless but true choices he alone has made.
he does not regret a single decision leading to his moment, and never has. this is both bad (morally) and good (for his psyche, i guess).
“Surely, surely he must see that? Every man alive was privileged; there was only one class of men, the privileged class. All alike would be condemned to die one day; his turn, too, would come like the othersʼ. And what difference could it make if, after being charged with murder, he were executed because he didnʼt weep at his motherʼs funeral, since it all came to the same thing in the end?”
in its absurdity, albert camus' the stranger is both tragic and hopeful, i suppose. but i don't think meursault is meant to be heroic, as authentic as he is, and i don't think the audience should model ourselves after him. if anything, he only gets agency in his life the moment he's near death—but shouldn't we strive for agency, instead of allowing pointlessness to push us around, while we're still alive? if meursault had more agency, he would definitely had a happier life. if he saw a point in love, he'd have been happily married to marie. if he didn't allow himself to be dragged around by raymond and stepped his foot down, maybe he'd still be alive. but really, the choices he could make can only be his own...
i do also believe that he may be neurodivergent, even if it wasn't camus' intent to portray him as such. in fact, he's written the stranger way before autism was even recognized. i still think that given the context that we live in, as we've now come to recognize these conditions, i don't mind the interpretation and themes of the book being aligned with the inhumane treatement of neurodiverse people. even if it's unintended, it makes sense. society has barely recognized it during the time of writing, and so society in the book is cruel to meursault, who doesn't seem to register his actions to be non-conforming. if anything, this is a more tragic and sad viewpoint of the book. valid, nonetheless. people were writing about PTSD in war books before it had even become a thing, anyway. it would explain his overstimulation, his isolation from society, all that. anyhow it makes meursault's final catharsis and embrace of other's hatred towards him very sad. it's as though he's accepted himself to be just as inhuman as the world believes him to be, and that instead of fighting it, he'll find peace in that affirmation of hate in his last moments instead of changing. once again taking agency for his own self, but at what cost.
... phew!! this was a lengthy write up!! and tbh, i don't think i've arranged my thoughts properly either u_u i'm a little worried about not making sense to myself when i read this back in the future, but i've come to really enjoy the stranger! i've initially given this a 7 (slow start), but it's a very thought-provoking novel!! i can't stop thinking about it. with it's length, i'll probably read it again at some point. i'm not good with words, nor am i the best at gathering themes from books and media. but i have fun! and i try!!
in the end, i think the stranger is about the existence of the absurd. of contradictions and things being as they are, happening just because. good things can happen as much as bad things can. we are lucky to be alive, and we are unfortunate that one day we must die. just because. while acknowledging this is important to live a more fulfilled and authentic life (such as when meursault and mother meursault lived as themselves in the face of death), we must not wait until death to take ahold of it.
it's easy to be swept away in the meaninglessness of it all nowadays, i think. easy to just stay passive. it's as relevant today as ever, given how scary things are.
we must not lose ourselves.
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when trying to make sense of my thoughts after reading the book, i came across this reddit post and their thoughts resonated with mine. it inspired me to find the words i wanted to use.
"On the end of 'the stranger'." Noivis (Reddit).
... i don't know how to properly tag this, i suck at philosophy. uh.
absurdism, camus, existentialism (?), finding meaning in life, philosophy
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✉️: angelais@protonmail.com