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CHAPTER 1 The redemptive power of absurd walls in The Stranger

As far as we can tell, Camus’ commitment to the absurd as a literary and philosophical mission began in May 1936, the same month he defended his dissertation on the subject of Christian metaphysics and Neoplatonism at the University of Algiers (Zaretsky 2013: 14). “Philosophical work: Absurdity,” he wrote in his journal.¹ Two years later, he reiterated the sentiment two more times in his journal. While he was still in the research and contemplation phase, he determined to tackle the subject, almost simultaneously, in three different genres: a novel, a play, and an essay. Caligula came first;² The Stranger, the “novel of the absurd,”³ followed, and, shortly thereafter, The Myth of Sisyphus, the “essay on the absurd,” came into being (ibid., 15–16).

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Naming this creative cycle the “three absurds” (Sharpe 2015: 41), Camus’ initial intention was to have the works published as a single volume (Foley 2008: 14). Although the three belonged to different genres, he clearly conceived of them as a unified, profoundly interconnected body of work. When all three of the works had been completed, he declared, “Beginnings of liberty,” as if he had to get the absurd off his chest (Sharpe 2015: 41). The Myth of Sisyphus was only his first “myth,” one of a prospective trio that he never managed to complete,⁴ yet although he “progressed beyond” his three absurds, he “remained faithful” to the “exigency which prompted them” (Camus 1955: vi).

Among the various critiques The Stranger was met with upon its release in 1942 – all of which were rejected by Camus, regardless of whether they were good or mixed, as “based on misunderstandings” (Zaretsky 2013: 43) – Sartre’s “Explication of The Stranger” stood out for its undeniable lucidity. Sartre, Zaretsky writes, filtered the baffling novel “through the insights of the philosophical essay” (ibid., 43). Obviously inspired by Camus’ own distinction between the “feeling of the absurd” and the “notion of the absurd” (MS, 27), Sartre argued that The Myth aims at “giving us this idea” whereas The Stranger is intended to give us the feeling. Indeed, just as the feeling of the absurd “lays the foundations” for the concept but is not limited to it and can even go further thanks to its aliveness (MS, 27), so The Stranger silently thrusts us into the territory of the absurd, leaving it to The Myth to “illumine the landscape” (Golomb 2005: 141).⁵

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Brombert (1948: 119) justifiably questions Sartre’s consideration of the essay as a key to the novel. Claiming that such an approach is “neither logical nor truly critical,” Brombert comments that the reader of The Stranger cannot be expected to have read The Myth. While a writer’s essays may be used to further elucidate his or her works, they cannot be treated as a starting point: A literary work should contain its own explanation, functioning as both the “communicating vehicle” and that which is communicated (ibid., 121). On the basis of this rationale, I would like to suggest going in the other direction, that is, I would like to consider The Stranger not as a representation of the absurd hero that merely “exhibits”⁶ and never really lives, but rather as a starting point that can shed more light on the concept of the absurd as presented in The Myth and even go further. From this perspective, The Myth branches out from The Stranger as its “philosophical twin,” transforming images into thoughts (Golomb 2005: 130). I choose to take this approach not to protect The Stranger’s literary independence, but because I believe that it is more faithful to Camus’ own intention, as well as the nature of Camus’ absurdism. As such, it can generate the most insightful reading of the two texts.

In the introduction I contended that as far as Camus’ absurdism is concerned, the right order is from art to the “phenomenology of the ‘notion of the absurd’ ” (Golomb 2005: 120–121). This cannot be otherwise, because in a universe devoid of abstract realities and Platonic essences, the “concrete signifies nothing more than itself” (MS, 94) and therefore all thought can do is cover “with images what has no reason” (ibid., 95). Nowadays philosophy serves appearances and not the other way around: While universal concepts bend before life’s particularities and pluralities, reason cannot “comprehensively explain,” but it can “lucidly describe” (Sharpe 2015: 43–45), as well as imitate, life and duplicate its experiences (MS, 92). Camus’ 1952 praise of Melville’s writings reflects his own approach of absurd creation: “In Melville the symbol grows out of reality, the image springs from perception” (Dunwoodie 2007: 162).

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As well as recognizing that in an absurd universe a philosophical novel communicates more of the feeling and experience of the absurd than an essay does, Camus believes that fiction is better able to combat the immanent nihilism of such a universe.⁷ To promote the “ideal of authentic life,” which transcends “rational discourse,” one requires concrete images rather than abstracts – emotionally engaging images that effectively arouse sufficient pathos and “existential anguish,” which enable readers to transcend nihilism and grow in authenticity (Golomb 2005: 120). The philosophical novel frees the universe from illusion and populates it instead with “truths of flesh and blood” to entice the reader to revolt without hope (MS, 99).

By first grounding ourselves in the novel, considering it a more capable vehicle for the feeling and experience of the absurd – and accordingly reading The Myth as its conceptual extension and transformation into thought – we may arrive at an interpretation that differs from those offered by most commentators. The Stranger has engendered a great deal of social, cultural, political, and psychological readings.⁸ Indeed, it was Camus himself who insisted that the novel possessed a “social” meaning too (Foley 2008: 21), explicitly encouraging the reader to focus on the main character’s refusal to “play the game” and subject himself to collective untruthfulness (Ohayon 1983: 189). Yet even a commentator such as Foley (2008: 21), who follows Camus’ advice, recognizes that the social intention is suffocated by the “sheer metaphysical weight” of the novel’s wish to convey the inner and intimate journey of the absurd mind.⁹

This reading reveals the novel to be the description of the step-by-step process of the awakening of a dormant consciousness to the reality of ←20 | 21→the absurd: its initial failure to respond to it; the methodical approach it employs in order to embrace it, and the inner liberation it consequently achieves. As Zaretsky (2013: 45–46) puts it, The Stranger is, above all, a portrayal of a man “forming a mind”: the emergence of a genuine self-reflection. Thus, deciphering the novel’s symbols extricates and sheds light on the very same methodology applied by Camus in The Myth, with its first part corresponding to the first 26 pages of The Myth (capturing, conceptually rather than phenomenologically, the feeling of the absurd), its second part to pages 27–114 (the persistent negation of all hope), and its ending to pages 115–119 (the absurd elevation). I contend that at the heart of The Stranger lies the same principle that guides the journey of The Myth – that limits, whether they are The Stranger’s concrete prison walls or The Myth’s abstract absurd walls, not only define human nature, but also hold a surprising redemptive power, which is the crux of the absurdist enlightenment.

Part I: An initial awakening

Much of The Stranger’s first part is narrated in a literary style that directly expresses the climate of the absurd. As Sartre observed, its “atomistic sentences in the present tense,” of “arbitrary facticity” and with no rational connection to bind them, isolate each moment from all others, emptying life of any “meaningful context” (Golomb 2005: 131–132). Devoid of past or future, Meursault slides through “an endless procession of present moments” (Zaretsky 2013: 23), embodying what The Myth later captured as “that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate” (MS, 119).

Yet this style, which describes but never explains, establishes more than the feeling of the absurd: The broken reality reflects a disjointed consciousness, which does not yet exist as a self-reflective mind.¹⁰ The hollow narrative nearly caricatures Hume’s “bundle” theory of the self; ←21 | 22→its use of language allows us to penetrate into Meursault’s “innermost life” only to realize that there is nothing there (Golomb 2005: 131–132). Not only is Meursault devoid of any interiority; he is literally incapable of self-awareness. When he glances at the mirror, all that is reflected in it is “a corner of my table with my alcohol lamp next to some pieces of bread” (TS, 24); there is simply “not yet a self to be seen” (Zaretsky 2013: 25). It is a “truly transparent” consciousness (Brombert 1948: 120), which requires other people and objects to mirror its own moods, like self-judgment, the need to cry, apathy and the inner voice that troubles it (TS, 10–11). As Golomb (2005: 130) states, the Meursault of the first part is far from a paragon of authenticity: His inability to lie reflects not courage, but rather a purely “spontaneous” and “uncomplicated” mind, which lacks any duality or struggle within itself (Dunwoodie 2007: 157).

This barely existent consciousness, nevertheless, is pushed to awaken by two elements: death and the light of truth. Death, the most unrejectable limit of consciousness and life, opens and concludes The Stranger. The confrontation with life’s ultimate limit unconsciously ignites in Meursault the “Why?,” the protest against meaninglessness. For the first time, consciousness opens one eye to regard reality, but it manages to fall asleep again (TS, 4, 7). That is because the death of another – even the death of a dear one – is not necessarily enough to shake one up completely. As Scherr (2014: 170, 176) suggests, in his Freudian reading of the novel, it may be that in the unconscious none of us believes in our own death, since we are unable to conceive of the death of our ego; only a fully conscious awareness of the frontiers of our life (as direct as Meursault’s confrontation with death in the second part of The Stranger) has the potential to do that. This is echoed in The Myth when Camus argues that the death of others is but an unconvincing rumor and that there is no way to prepare for death, since all we know is life and consciousness (MS, 14).

Yet, as soon as death pierces Meursault’s sleepy mind and life, light begins to agitate him. In front of his mother’s closed casket, he is “blinded” by the light and the brightness of the room, and only feels more drowsy ←22 | 23→(TS, 8, 9); likewise, in The Myth, physical light turns into the subdued, abstract light of absurdity (MS, 9), which everyone evades, hoping for a “flight from light,” as light provokes a painful lucidity “in the face of experience” (ibid., 3). Light, the second catalyst of awakening, is non-causal and random; it may strike “at any street corner” (ibid., 9), and its most demanding manifestation is the sun.

The sun in The Stranger is the sun of the absurd,¹¹ which has glowed ever since humanity committed the crime of patricide against the heavenly father. It is perhaps not coincidental that Nietzsche – “the most famous of God’s assassins,” according to Camus (MS, 106) – uses the same symbol when exclaiming that, with the murder of God, we have “unchained this earth from its sun” and are therefore “moving away from all suns” (Hollingdale 1999: 139). Meursault’s consciousness is forced to awaken in light of the absurdist reality that radiates unbearably and scorchingly over his head, in a Nietzschean, godless, and amoral world. The sun is the uninvited “awareness of the immanent nature of the world,” which rises as soon as the ethic that was our beacon has lost its power over us (Golomb 2005: 132).

As the bright light of the phenomenal world, the sun, when it shines moderately, illumines life’s objects of pleasure and the sensual earth – like Camus’ life-affirming sun in the Noces (Dunwoodie 2007: 152–154). When it grows in strength and becomes achingly dazzling, however, it lays bare the reality of the earth’s emptiness and oppressive inhumanity (TS, 15) and compels the consciousness to actually see the “Nada that could only have originated in a country crushed by the sun” (Dunwoodie 2007: 155–156). In this intense state, the sun is undefeatable and all-pervasive: “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” (TS, 17). There is no way ←23 | 24→out: Wherever one goes, whether in the atheistic direction or the theistic direction, one would be confronted by the “inevitability of death,” which renders one’s life “absurd and unfulfilled” (Scherr 2014: 179).

Indeed, the awakened mind, which had formerly been protected by unselfconsciousness and apathy, might not find a way out, but it would at least seek relief in an absurd rebellion. Here, the paths of Meursault and Camus’ other major absurd hero, Caligula, momentarily converge. Both characters conclude erroneously – Caligula in a far more deliberate tone – that an unbridled and destructive nihilistic outburst would be the proper response to the sun that blinds them. Both leave the funerals of loved ones with an “alarmed new consciousness of human mortality” (Scherr 2014: 186) and find themselves disorientedly driven to murder as a protest against death. Incapable of embracing it, it is as if they attempt to “murder” death itself,¹² and thereby initiate a seemingly predetermined chain of events that will inevitably lead to their deaths; in a way, they substitute suicide for murder.

Like Dostoevsky’s Kirilov, who postulated that killing God means becoming a god yourself, but was unable to handle the freedom he granted himself (MS, 104–105), Meursault and Caligula infer that now “everything is unconditionally permitted,” and assume the role of gods on earth by amorally “determining the fate of others” (Golomb 2005: 133–134). They think that they go all the way with the illogical logic of the absurd, yet the novel and the play alike demonstrate that such a rebellion does not have a liberating effect; what it does lead to is the disillusionment of realizing that this is the wrong type of freedom (C, 63). While one might be tempted to blame the sun, the sun does not in itself necessarily push one to nihilism; its role is only to show and to stimulate realization.

On the fateful day on which Meursault enacts the wrong type of freedom, two other symbols – which later become established in The Myth as concepts – are at play. The first is the sea, also represented by Meursault’s lover Marie,¹³ which momentarily enables the fulfillment of the longing for ←24 | 25→unity: “We felt a closeness as we moved in unison and were happy” (TS, 50). But since, in an absurd universe, one could never fully achieve unity with oneself, others, and the world as a whole, Meursault must be torn away from the experience to lucidly confront his reality – in the same way that Sisyphus, who enjoyed the smiling earth and the “sparkling sea” too much, would be snatched “from his joys” by the gods and dragged to his rock (MS, 116). Accordingly, the sea grows weaker and is finally replaced by the sun’s “sea of molten lead” (TS, 57–58). The sun, which inflicts the same inescapable pain as on the day of the funeral, soon introduces the second symbol which completes it: silence (TS, 55). In this climate, where there is nothing besides awareness and emptiness, and everything closes in around him, Meursault vainly attempts to overpower and break the silence of the indifferent universe (TS, 59). Although the setting seems to evoke hopeless action, it is Meursault who finally disrupts the unity and happiness and chooses to place himself in the persistent tension between the longing for harmony and the impossibility of ever resting in its fulfillment.

Part II: Prison as home

The Stranger’s second part is characterized by a distinct shift of consciousness, which is made immediately perceptible by its significantly more complex and sophisticated literary style. A language of “assessment and reason,” “cogitation and memory,” takes the place of the raw and immediate language of “physicality, need and desire” (Dunwoodie 2007: 157–159). This shift heralds Meursault’s gradual evolution from an unthinking, transparent mind to a “self-reflexive consciousness” (ibid., 159–160). We are plunged into a rich subjective world of contradictory “feelings, motives and world outlook” (Golomb 2005: 131–132). Yet we are somewhat prepared, since Meursault’s declaration at the end of Part I that he had shattered the “exceptional silence of a beach where I’d been happy” (TS, 59) gives away a newfound awareness of an internal mood.

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But why does Meursault grow in “self-awareness once he is imprisoned” (Zaretsky 2013: 45)?¹⁴ Slochower (1969: 294) and Ohayon (1983: 198–200) argue that shooting the Arab causes Meursault’s consciousness to come alive and to consolidate a self. This “original sin,” writes Ohayon, “cracked Sisyphus’ rock” and extricated fossilized thoughts and feelings, thus activating an “intrapsychic life.” However, this does not accord with Camus’ line of thought, especially in the form it takes in Caligula. Both the play and the novel are pronounced statements against nihilism, and their acts of murder represent the mind’s failed attempt to overcome absurd reality. If anything, it is Meursault’s sobering up, his realization that that freedom was not the right one, that guided him toward a more mature way of handling the absurd – a way that ultimately enabled the crystallization of an authentic and reflective selfhood in him.¹⁵ Rather than shattering the limits imposed on human consciousness, residing wholeheartedly within these confines allows one’s existence to find its noblest fulfillment. Indeed, in a godless world, what awakens and delivers the individual is not the apparent freedom achieved by God’s absence, but the intense limits one voluntarily forces upon oneself.¹⁶

With the disappearance of hope – represented by the cessation of Marie’s visits – Meursault can finally feel “at home” in his cell (TS, 72). He is content to gaze at the sea through the small window, and to grip the bars with his face “straining toward the light,” and he favors his quiet and dark cell over the dizzying visiting room with its “harsh light pouring out of the sky” (ibid., 73) – again rejecting the fulfillment of his longing for unity, while keeping this longing aflame. He renounces fantasies of freedom and accepts the identity of a prisoner, likening himself to one who lives ←26 | 27→in the “trunk of a dead tree,” from which he can only “look up at the sky” (ibid., 76–77).

There are good reasons to suspect that Meursault unconsciously drives himself into his cell and eventual death sentence, which implies that in order to achieve authenticity, one’s consciousness directs itself toward the recognition of its limits. It is plausible that after his mother’s death, Meursault felt compelled to demonstrate that indeed “there was no way out” (TS, 17) by simulating a seemingly deterministic act. Scherr (2014: 179–180) suggests that the Arab was Meursault’s “surrogate for his own death,” a way of intimately experiencing death “without dying himself.” Ohayon (1983: 190–201) sides with this view from a different angle, pointing out that Meursault does not repent since he wants to be sentenced to death.¹⁷ Grounding himself in Camus’ own words, that Meursault is the “only Christ we deserved,” Ohayon outlines the ways in which Meursault imitates Jesus’ refusal to escape his fate by remaining silent, as well as Jesus’ self-image as a sacrificial offering to the world (ibid., 190–201). Yet, just like Caligula, Meursault’s wish for death cannot take the form of suicide, since the opposite of suicide is the “man condemned to death” (MS, 53) – and being condemned to death is the reality that the absurd hero must authentically confront.

While the sun was the great awakener of the first part, Part II introduces the reader to the second catalyst of lucidity: the confinement of the prison cell – the difference being that the sun is an aggressive cosmic intervention, whereas the cell is a conscious choice of the absurd hero. Such a hero determines to “make his rock, or his prison walls, everything that he has” (Skrimshire 2006: 296), since by realizing that this prison cell is “all we have and all we need,” we gain a key to self-transformation (ibid., 297). Truly, we all await our death sentence in the cosmic cell, and all that we have left is the infinite sky above our head, which represents our eternal longing. And so, the only thing a human being should be interested in is execution (TS, 110) – an unwavering acknowledgment of the limit of our life and consciousness. Such an acute recognition of being hanged sooner ←27 | 28→or later is one of the “few things” that “concentrate the mind” and cause an individual to come to oneself (Zaretsky 2013: 45–46). Indeed, the philosophical perspective conveyed through The Stranger seems to propose that one’s authenticity is put to the test by the Heideggerian “Being-towards-death” and is formed by the manner in which one faces this terminal limit (Golomb 2005: 130).

Between these four absurd walls, Meursault – “the most faithful incarnation of Camus’ absurd reasoning” (Skrimshire 2006: 288) – throws himself into an unsparing process of renunciation, which clarifies much of The Myth’s methodology of “persistence.” Camus’ philosophical criticism of scientific knowledge, religious belief and existentialist flight has one real purpose: to force the mind into a state of complete negation in order to allow an encounter with reality as it is. The “refusal to lie” is broadened to include even the subtlest form of mental escape. This is done with an “austere dignity” (Foley 2008: 22), a monk-like abstinence, which demonstrates that pushing the absurd to its “logical conclusions” (C, 45) does not imply a nihilistic freedom, but rather a radical form of self-constraint.

This brings to mind Camus’ imagining of another absurd hero, Don Juan, sitting in a cell in a monastery, close to death and contemplating, “through a narrow slit in the sun-baked wall,” a bland land in which he “recognizes himself” (MS, 74). Meursault, too, looks at the walls’ stones for months, and finds in them neither metaphysical consolation nor earthly satisfaction (TS, 119). One by one, he abandons any comforting habits of the mind and body: desires and sensual passions, sex and smoking (ibid., 82), the knowledge of books (ibid., 108), and logical arguments (ibid., 114). When the priest enters, the last embodiment of hope, Meursault feels that his cell is crowded and uncomfortable (Scherr 2014: 173). He learns the absurd through his attempts to evade it (MS, 110), thus rejecting faith as a “safeguard against suffering and despair” (Henke 2017: 137) and removing the “little painted screens” that the priest holds in front of his face to “hide the scaffold” from him (MS, 88). That is not to say that he does not experience moments of tragic consciousness and revolt against the limits of existence during his own dark, endless night of Gethsemane, awaiting his Antichrist crucifixion (ibid., 118), yet the struggle to escape the absurd, he knows, is an inseparable part of the absurd.

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An unexpected union

The Stranger’s last pages (115–123) elucidate, by means of an emotionally captivating experience, the shift from persistent negation to the happy Sisyphus at the end of The Myth. They begin with Meursault’s second violent outburst, this time at the prison chaplain. As the violent eruption at the end of Part I purged his being of nihilism and catalyzed a more mature response to the absurd, so the outburst near the end of Part II finally purifies his being of all hope, completes the process of negation and drives him toward absurd enlightenment. Herein lies the transforming potential of absurd revolt: Though it can never transcend the boundaries of absurdist reality, it ironically gives rise to the inner power needed to fully accept it.¹⁸ This joyous blind rage washes Meursault clean (TS, 122), preparing him for the final outcome of absurd negation. Like the Arab, the chaplain is merely a reflection of an inner mode, in this case the remaining contradiction still buried within Meursault. By proving that he is able to disrupt the chaplain’s complacency and metaphysical certainty (Henke 2017: 137), Meursault demonstrates that his mind has integrated to the extent that it is capable of rejecting any attempt to dissolve the absurdist tension. All of a sudden, this apparently simpleminded individual gathers together all the fragments of his life and mind to form a bold philosophical statement.

But what brings about Meursault’s sudden affirmation that everything he has is, truly, everything he desires (Skrimshire 2006: 288)? The Stranger’s last pages provide one with an illumined path: At first, the mind that comes to recognize the limits of existence struggles to release itself, but if instead it fervently negates even the subtlest form of escape, the negation finally places it within the limits, enabling one’s being to fall into the depths of this life and this universe. From within the limits, one can comprehend the universe from the inside. This, in turn, causes the universe’s internal powers and sources of light to awaken; thus, the dark night becomes “alive with signs and stars” (TS, 122).

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This is how absurd walls (MS, 9) turn into absurd freedom (ibid., 49); what appears superficially as a predicament devised by gods, who believed that there could be no greater punishment than futility and eternal repetition (ibid., 115), is transformed by the absurd mind into the happiest of all choices. If one is ready to be condemned, one is no longer condemned. Suffering is not Sisyphus’ rock, but rather his imagination that there could be another life at all (ibid., 118–119). Thus, the absurd mind holds an extraordinary power to find liberty “in the oddest of places – even Oran or Hades” (Zaretsky 2013: 37–38) – or prison, for that matter. If, in response to Nietzsche’s harrowing thought-experiment,¹⁹ it can sanctify that eternal repetition – if indeed the only other life it envisioned were one where it could remember this life (TS, 120) – the “divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting” would finally be mended (MS, 5). The life that was given becomes the life that is chosen, and the mind becomes unified with the experience.²⁰

An uninterrupted awareness of the limits releases human consciousness from its prison while still being in it. In actuality, the more the limits press in from all sides, the greater the opportunity for liberation. Limits, The Stranger tells us, make us conscious, wake us up to the “Why?”, encourage us to overcome nihilism, and lead us to deliberately choose and accept our life. Their presence does not weaken the life-force, but rather enhances it, making us “ready to live it all again” (TS, 122).

Yet, this relaxation into the limits of human existence also opens a window onto a type of experience that is briefly introduced on the final pages of both The Stranger and The Myth. As Meursault calms down after the chaplain’s departure, he falls asleep only to wake up with the stars in his face; he is then flooded by the sounds and smells of the earth,²¹ and a tide of nature’s “wondrous peace” flows through him (TS, 122). While separating from a world that no longer means anything to him, he opens himself to the “gentle indifference of the world” (ibid., 122) and, with genuine ←30 | 31→happiness, finds the universe “much like myself – so like a brother, really” (ibid., 122–123). Correspondingly, The Myth concludes with a statement that as Sisyphus unites with his limited fate, the godless universe is no longer “sterile nor futile,” its now welcome silence allowing the countless “little voices of the earth” to arise and each atom and mineral flake of his stone and mountain to form a world unto itself (MS, 119). These poetic descriptions indicate that the feeling of the universe from the inside may lead to an absurd form of cosmic union.

Whereas the most fundamental experience of the absurd originates from the rift between one’s consciousness and life (MS, 5), those cosmic perceptions show one that by fully accepting the strangeness – the impenetrable mystery of oneself and the universe (ibid., 19) – the mind attains an odd kind of intimacy with the world, which goes some way toward healing this essential rift. Both mind and cosmos, knower and known, become, so to speak, brothers in strangeness, bathing in the same unknowable silent waters.²² “Making a home in one’s homelessness” brings about a revelation that one is tied to creation as much as one remains forever a stranger to it (Skrimshire 2006: 289).

This unexpected “harmonious bond” with the universe is uncovered “despite or because of this absurdity” (Golomb 2005: 130). Paradoxically, those who attempt to make the unreasonable world known and familiar, as well as those who strive to transcend it, are the true strangers and outsiders, and, thus, Meursault alone is the “one who is actually at home” (ibid., 130). At the end of the novel, we realize that imposing on oneself the limit of knowing can bring the mind closer to creation and that strangeness does not necessarily mean estrangement. On the contrary, those capable of feeling the universe from the inside have the ears to hear the earth’s own voice of depth and meaning.

In light of this interpretation, one can observe that The Stranger delineates a clear roadmap of the evolution of the absurd mind. At first, an unformed consciousness meets with the reality of death, the “why?” begins ←31 | 32→to surface, and it is urged toward a lucid recognition of its predicament. It wrongly resorts to nihilism, which does not even provide relief. Then it takes it upon itself to enter the cosmic cell to confront its limits. In a sincere act of sober humility, it enters an intense process of negation and renunciation – rejecting all hope, all human answers, any release from the tension between longing and fulfillment, and even worldly pleasures. It constantly shifts between acceptance and revolt, until it attains a climax of revolt, which eliminates hope. Finally, this integrated consciousness enters a profound acceptance of limits, realizing that this acceptance liberates it. Now it experiences itself as both imprisoned and liberated, separate and unified, alienated and intimate, longing and content. Merging into the paradoxical nature of the universe itself, it glimpses an absurdist union, a sharing of the unknowable with the cosmos that illumines life from within.

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1 Why this subject sparked in him interest in absurdism is a matter of speculation. No doubt, his awareness of it was ignited by his supervisor, the French philosopher Jean Grenier, who encouraged him to read existentialists such as Kierkegaard, Chestov, and Berdyaev (Srigley 2007: 4). We also know that apart from his teachers, the one who stirred Camus’ thought the most was Nieztsche: his name repeatedly appears in Camus’ early Notebooks and Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy is often referenced in his Master’s thesis (ibid., 5). McBride (1992) devoted his study to demonstrating the influence of Saint Augustine and Nietzcshe as well as Camus’ dissertation as a whole on his later development of absurdist notions. His principal argument is that Camus’ absurdism derived from his ambiguous relationship with Christianity and from his unfulfilled longing for unity with God. And Walker argues that the Plotinian conception of one’s desire for a homeland and the existential unease due to its loss, or absence, re-emerged in its absurdist form in The Myth of Sisyphus (Srigley 2007: 16).

2 In terms of the realization of the three projects, Caligula came last: It was first performed in 1945.

3 I have borrowed the term from Bombert’s 1948 article title “Camus and the Novel of the ‘Absurd.’ ”

4 Sisyphus was meant to be followed by the myth of Prometheus and the myth of Nemesis. An even broader plan consisted of five stages: absurd, revolt, judgment, love, and “creation corrected,” each expressed in the form of a novel, a play, and an essay (Sharpe 2015: 41). Roberts (2008: 875–876) notes that Camus’ 1956 novel, The Fall, was his only deviation from these carefully-planned cycles: though in some respects it is a complement to The Stranger, it “came into being more by accident.”

5 Here I mention once again a suggestion I made in the introduction: such a relationship between feeling and concept could easily be applied to film and Camus’ philosophy of the absurd. Films, probably even more than novels, engage not only our intellectual, but also our imaginative and emotional faculties in ways that engender a phenomenological and visceral, as well as a more straightforwardly conceptual, grasp of the issue, hence their superior capacity to capture and explore this almost pre-reflexive absurd feeling.

6 See, for example, Foley’s interpretation (2008: 14–22), which starts with Sisyphus and, from there, delves into the novel as a demonstration of the essay’s concepts of “wild courage and rebellious scorn.”

7 See, for instance, Camus’ claim in his preface to Nicolas Chamfort works: “[O];ur greatest moralists are not makers of maxims – they are novelists” (quoted in Sharpe 2015: 45–46).

8 See, for example, the psychological analyses of Stamm 1969; Slochower 1969, Ohayon 1983, and Scherr 2014. See also O’Brien’s overtly political reading from 1970; Dunwoodie’s cultural interpretation from 2007, and philosophical readings, such as Golomb 2005 and Foley 2008, which place the novel within the context of individual/society relations, as the absurd individual’s struggle for integrity.

9 This is Brombert’s central criticism (1948: 121–123): the novel’s literary weakness is that Camus breathes into the main character’s nostrils the “life of his own mind,” forcing him to express the author’s ideas.

10 For the most part, I will use in this chapter, and in Part I as a whole, the term “consciousness” in a way that does not deviate from Husserl’s and Sartre’s conception of it; that is, that consciousness is always consciousness of something (Sartre 2003: 650). However, on occasion, I use the term as, simply, the equivalent of “mind.”

11 Ohayon (1983: 190–198) devotes his entire article to the contrary argument that The Stranger’s sun is the metaphor of “patriarchal absolutism” (ibid., 193), acting as the negative image of the father-God. Accordingly, Meursault is the rebellious son. This is disputable: first, the father-God is sufficiently represented in the novel by the magistrate and the chaplain, and second, it does not make sense that God, who is represented by moralists such as the magistrate and the chaplain, would urge Meursault to kill the Arab.