The Stranger: The Absurd Man

Most people reading The Stranger for the first time might be put off by Meursault's strange behavior. He always acts outside of typical societal expectations. He has little reaction to life-changing events, like the death of his mother and Marie's marriage proposal to him. However, he snaps at specific points, like when he kills the Arab on the beach without much apparent thought. He has no regard for the consequences of his decisions and actions. He is truly a "stranger" to society. Like many other readers, I first thought Meursault was a detached sociopath and expected the book to go deeper into his mental "derangement," perhaps explaining why he was that way. However, the book mostly leaves Meursault alone, leaving it up to the reader to decide whether he is insane. 

After thinking about Meursault more, I believe that Camus intended the character to be just different than most, but not in a wrong way. Maybe he isn't suppressing any feelings about his dead mother. Perhaps he does not spend hours of his morning doing nothing because of subconscious trauma he is not dealing with but because he just does what he wants to in the present moment. Meursault is one who "goes with the flow." He does not lament too much about the past, no matter what happened, nor plans ahead for the future. He spent an entire day and night with Marie the day he met her because he liked her, simple as that. His affection for cigarettes and coffee describes how he carries his life well. If something attracts him in the present moment, he will move towards it. He will not reserve much mental capacity for thinking about the past or future. It's not because he wants to avoid those thoughts. It's because he believes he will be able to deal with them once he gets there. This thinking may seem immature initially, but I think this is how he functions. 

Meursault is almost the perfect "absurd man," a term inspired by Albert Camus's other works and derived further from older philosophy. The absurd man knows that the world does not actually surmount any higher purpose. Most of the meaning and explanation humans construct for the universe is, by definition, constructed. I find it difficult to believe that Meursault would be closer to a psychopath than an absurd man. He is not superficial: most people around him know what kind of person he is. In the courtroom segment, Marie admits that Meursault spent the day after his mother's funeral having fun with her. Others he sees daily like him and tells him things despite his general indifference. Meursault is not even quite a stranger to society. 

However, when does this sort of thinking go too far? Meursault takes his amorality of the world to the point where it starts affecting others. He establishes the threat of an unhappy marriage by agreeing to marry Marie without feeling anything. He helps ruin Raymond's mistresses wife by writing a deprecatory letter to the court about her. And, most significantly, he takes the life of another man. This is why I said Meursault is almost the perfect absurd man. In reality, he is not quite there until the very end of the novel. Through the book's first half, he goes through the motions of his life. He makes decisions when he feels like it, with no real reason behind them. The world's meaninglessness is apparent to him, but he sort of pushes his indifference to the side, not viewing it in any particular way. However, when he finally faces his execution, he finds comfort in the universe's meaninglessness; he embraces it, ready for the execution, knowing that it won't matter for anything in the end and being okay with the fact. If post-revelation Meursault was shown to the reader from the start of the book, it would be much more evident that he was an absurd man than a psychopath.