Camus’s Afterward:
...A long time ago, I summed up The Outsider in a sentence I realise is extremely paradoxical: `In our society any man who doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral is liable to be condemned to death.’ I simply meant that the hero of the book is condemned because he doesn’t play the game. In this sense, he is an outsider to the society in which he lives, wandering on the fringe, on the outskirts of life, solitary and sensual. And for that reason, some readers have been tempted to regard him as a reject. But to get a more accurate picture of his character, or rather one which conforms more closely to his author’s intentions, you must ask yourself in what way Meursault doesn’t play the game. The answer is simple: he refuses to lie. Lying is not saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact, especially saying more than is true and, in case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler. But, contrary to appearances, Meursault doesn’t want to make life simpler. He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings and society immediately feels threatened. For example, he is asked to say that he regrets his crime, in time-honoured fashion. He replies that he feels more annoyance about it than true regret. And it is this nuance that condemns him.
So for me Meursault is not a reject, but a poor and naked man, in love with a sun which leaves no shadows. Far from lacking all sensibility, he is driven by a tenacious and therefore profound passion, the passion for an absolute and for truth. The truth is as yet a negative one, a truth born of living and feeling, but without which no triumph over the self or over the world will ever be possible.
So one wouldn’t be far wrong in seeing The Outsider as the story of a man who, without any heroic pretensions, agrees to die for the truth. I also once said, and again paradoxically, that I tried to make my character represent the only Christ that we deserve. It will be understood, after these explanations, that I said it without any intention of blasphemy but simply with the somewhat ironic affection that an artist has a right to feel towards the characters he has created....
The last two paragraphs:
....I had been shouting so much that I’d lost my breath, and just then the jailers rushed in and started trying to release the chaplain from my grip. One of them made as if to strike me. The chaplain quietened them down, then gazed at me for a moment without speaking. I could see tears in his eyes. Then he turned and left the cell.
Once he’d gone, I felt calm again. But all this excitement had exhausted me and I dropped heavily on to my sleeping plank. I must have had a longish sleep, for, when I woke, the stars were shining down on my face. Sounds of the countryside came faintly in, and the cool night air, veined with smells’ of earth and salt, fanned my cheeks. The marvelous peace of the sleepbound summer night flooded through me like a tide. Then, just on the edge of daybreak, I heard a steamer’s siren. People were starting on a voyage to a world which had ceased to concern me forever. Almost for the first time in many months I thought of my mother. And now, it seemed to me, I understood why at her life’s end she had taken on a “fiancé”; why she’d played at making a fresh start. There, too, in that Home where lives were flickering out, the dusk came as a mournful solace. With death so near, Mother must have felt like someone on the brink of freedom, ready to start life all over again. No one, no one in the world had any right to weep for her. And I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration...
Me:
You made the point, if I have it right, that in the end Mersault after abject alienation, after his characteristic“flat affect,” at last exults in being able to feel emotion, feel something, and perhaps (this is me now interpreting you) there’s some kind of personal redemption/vindication for him in that.
But at the end he says he’s happy, his long sleep cleansing him of his previous anger toward the chaplain. So as I read this, he’s not incapable of emotion or sharp reaction to things. He assaults the chaplain. His assaultive anger seems purgative. Clam descends; a long sleep follows; and, as just noted, after it, he’s happy and calm. He has what might be called a parodic, even ironic, epiphany, an anti epiphany. Instead of being in a state of mystical union with God or with the symmetry of the universe, with the oneness of all things, he assimilates himself to the universe’s “benign indifference.” It flows through him, opens his heart, and makes him feel “so brotherly.” But it’s really an anti brotherliness because he feels kinship with no one else but himself:
...To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still...
Completing this solipsistic brotherly anti brotherliness, all that remains to perfect it is to have attend at his execution ...a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration...
He has been reborn into sheer negativity:
...And I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe...
His beckoning death is the apotheosis or the heights or the capper of the universe’s benign indifference. His death, death itself, vouches his, our, meaninglessness, the truth that nothing matters. The realization of, his experiencing of, the truth of meaninglessness, is liberating for him. As quoted, he exults in it.
So why then at the end does he want to feel less lonely—...For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely..—and what exactly is the “all to be accomplished”? Why aren’t his realization—his insight into indifference, and his calmness and joy in that sufficient? Why does his fulfillment require his hope that an execrating crowd will attend his execution?
My reading of that “hope” is it goes to him wanting to gain vindictive satisfaction in trumping the crowd, in triumphing over it, by being born alive, fulfilled, in death, the opposite of the execrating crowd having its hatred fulfilled by his death:
....With death so near, Mother must have felt like someone on the brink of freedom, ready to start life all over again. No one, no one in the world had any right to weep for her. And I, too, felt ready to start life all over again..
On my reading of his hope, and of these last two paragraphs of the book, what comes primarily forward, at least for me, is not so much Mersault’s finally feeling some emotion, something more than his flat affect—after all, his combative fury with the chaplain is hardly flat affect or emotional deadness—but rather his triumph in understanding meaninglessness, his anti epiphany.
If so, my previous point remains for me:
why with that insight does Mersault, as I just noted, need or want to feel less lonely: after all, he is, he says, so happy with his insight into meaninglessness; and
why does he need the seemingly vindictive pleasure of triumphing over his hoped for execrating crowd; after all, he is at one with the benign indifference of the universe?
The following occur to me as possibilities:
1. These last two paragraphs collapse into incoherence.
2. The ironies are so relentless that they circle back on themselves. So, Camus intentionally subverts what he seems to describe of Mersault’s triumphant realization.
3. I’m misreading the ending and either missing something important or erroneously overcomplicating things.
4. Something else.
From Camus’s after-note he seems not to have meant to be so ironic as I suggest in 2, though he does say at its end:
.... I tried to make my character represent the only Christ that we deserve. It will be understood, after these explanations, that I said it without any intention of blasphemy but simply with the somewhat *ironic* affection that an artist has a right to feel towards the characters he has created...(the asterisk are mine)
I interpret that to mean that Mersault, Christ like, sacrifices his life to be true to the truth:
...he refuses to lie. Lying is not saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact, especially saying more than is true and, in case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler. But, contrary to appearances, Meursault doesn’t want to make life simpler. He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings and society immediately feels threatened. For example, he is asked to say that he regrets his crime, in time-honoured fashion. He replies that he feels more annoyance about it than true regret. And it is this nuance that condemns him...
....So one wouldn’t be far wrong in seeing The Outsider as the story of a man who, without any heroic pretensions, agrees to die for the truth....
But, finally, these comments, as I read them and the last two paragraphs of the book, belie Mersault’s final need to feel less lonely and to want to triumph vindictively and with self-vindication over the hateful crowd. Camus’s after-note confers dignity and integrity on Mersault. And yet, it’s reasonably inferable that he reciprocally hates the haters. So at the very end there exists in him some degree of spiteful pettiness. And at the end that degree of spiteful pettiness is unlovely and all too human. It is inconsistent with his calm, happy, brotherly, unifying feeling derived by him from his anti epiphany.
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