The Outsider - Albert Camus

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Warning

The following post contains plot spoilers for The Outsider by Albert Camus.



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This book is about someone who goes to his mother's funeral then shots an arab and has to go on trial. His name is Meursault.

My favourite part of the book is the chapter after he comes back from the funeral. He's just sitting in his apartment, staring out of the window. The whole world is represented in that street. The boys, the girls, the noise and traffic. People buying and selling and making money. Mini dramas that start and are never finished or finished without you ever knowing the begining. The street outside is vibrant as ever and has ignored the fact that his mother has just died.

Stylistically I would say this closely resembles Catcher In The Rye but with a political conscience. If Caufield had grown up and moved to Algeria. There is an afterword in the edition I have. Camus says that Meursault is honest and that brings about his downfall. He does not cry at his mother's funeral and this used as evidence against him in the trial. He says that society abhors honesty, fears it in a way and wants to punish it. You must conform or else.

I slightly disagree. I felt, perhaps as a reasonable (hahaha!) man, that Meursault is in denial. He just flat out refused to believe or consider anything anyone else says. He answers every question like he doesn't care. When pushed on a subject he just gets tired or angry and never thinks about things with any depth or rationale outside his immediate experience. It's because he isn't a teenager that I cannot accept his detachment from his action, cannot quite register that he as no sense of responsibility for what he has done. He may be indifferent to mankind, but mankind is not indifferent to him.

At first I thought I could compare his existentialism to Hamlet's, but it is not a worthy comparison. Perhaps Marie could be Meursault's Ophelia? Though Hamlet's descent into self proposed madness is not adequately explained, at least he is literal about it. At least you get the feeling that he knows, or at least is trying to know why or how these feeling have come about. If you asked Meursault why he didn't believe in god, he would just answer 'because I don't believe in god.' With Hamlet you'd get at least a handful of quotable lines.

Despite these minor quibbles I have with Meursault, (and these quibbles is maybe the reason I liked this book so much), The Outsider is one of those books that drop kicks you into outer space (again). For me, it's another realisation of the power of word and idea. They say that great books are the light which by all of facets mankind may be read. Well, this is another one of those books. You have to go find great books, read closely and then they'll find you.