Mersault's Strange Character

    Mersault is one of the most interesting, unique characters I have personally ever seen in a literary book such as this one. Mersault's character is very mellow and emotionless, and it seems that the way that he lives his life is just to ride the waves of life, and no matter how tumultuous and hard life may be, he just keeps riding the waves without showing any care or emotion as to what life throws his way. In fact, Mersault almost never shows emotion to anything throughout the course of the book. He does get annoyed by things that he find to be inconveniences, but even then, eh doesn't make it clear to others what he feels or what he thinks about a certain scenario. Mersault is either an extremely resilient person, or he's so disconnected from basic human morals that he simply cannot feel basic human moral emotions, like pity or shame.

    At the start of the book, Mersault's mother died, and it didn't really seem that he was as emotionally affected by his mother passing away as other people were (or as other people expected him to be). One of her mother's friends were seen being more emotional than her own son was, as seen in chapter 1: "Soon one of the women started crying... I though she'd never stop... Then the caretaker came around to my side. He sat down next to me. After a long pause he explained, without looking at me, 'She was very close to your mother. She says your mother was her only friend and now she hasn't got anyone.' " (Camus 10, 11) So, if Mersault wasn't feeling so emotional for his mother's passing, that means that she wasn't very close to his own mother. Now, why do I say that Mersault wasn't feeling emotional for his mother's passing? Well, at the start of the book, this is what Mersault says about his conversation with his boss about having two days off of work: "I asked my boss for two days off and there was no way he was going to refuse me with an excuse like that. But he wasn't too happy about it...I didn't have anything to apologize for. He's the one who should have offered his condolences. But he probably will day after tomorrow, when he sees I'm in mourning." (Camus 3) His mother already passed, so shouldn't he already be in mourning? And we also see him callously start smoking in front of his mother's body with the caretaker, even though she was dead and she technically didn't have a say in what he could and couldn't do around her: "Then I felt like having a smoke. But I hesitated, because I didn't know if I could do it with Maman right there. I thought about it; it didn't matter. I offered the caretaker a cigarette and we smoked." (Camus 8)

    Another example of Mersault being very strange is in Chapter 6 of Part 1. At the end of the chapter, Mersault is seen getting ahold of Raymond's gun, and at the end of the chapter, we see him shoot an Arab mercilessly while also getting stinged by the light that was shining off of the knife that the Arab was holding to Mersault's eyes. "The scorching blade slashed at my eyelashes and stabbed at my stinging eyes...My whole being tensed and I squeezed my hand around the revolver. The trigger gave; I felt the smooth underside of the butt; and there, in that noise, sharp and deafening at the same time, is where it all started... Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace." (Camus 59) He shot an Arab five times in response to extreme heat and blinding light from the blade. Because he also said that it seemed to him "as if the sky split open from one end to the other to rain down fire." In response to that, he tensed his body and in doing so, he shot the Arab. Earlier in this chapter, Mersault was talking Raymond out of shooting the Arab, but he just did exactly what he didn't want Raymond to do in response to it being really hot. And then, after he shot the Arab, he went on to say: "And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness." Afterwards, in the beginning of Part 2, he got arrested.

    Mersault only really shows a semblance of emotion at the end of the book where he's seen yelling at the chaplain after he said he was going to pray for him. "Then, I don't know why, but something inside me snapped. I started yelling at the top of my lungs, and I insulted him and told him not to waste his prayers on me. I grabbed him by the collar of his cassock. I was pouring out on him everything that was in my heart, cries of anger and cries of joy." (Camus 120) Probably the only time in the story where he showed any emotion towards someone or something is when the priest was sharing his faith with him. For the next few pages, he went on a rant about how he thinks the priest is wrong and how he thinks he is right. I find it kind of interesting how this is one moment that makes Mersault show his strong emotions. Not when his mother passed away, not when he murdered someone, but when someone was sharing his faith with him. It could have been because he didn't have much time left, or perhaps because from the priest sharing his faith, he was experiencing for the first time feelings of guilt, regret, and shame.

    Mersault is a very interesting character. Usually, when you read first person books, you should be able to feel the same feelings that the main character is feeling, but in a book like this, where the main character doesn't show any emotion, (for me) it's hard to relate to the actions that the character does, especially when the main character's gimmick is doing things that blatantly contradict basic human morals, whether that be yelling at the top of his lungs at someone sharing their faith, or ruthlessly shooting and murdering someone, or not feeling any remorse at his mother's funeral.

Comments

  1. MitchellNovember 15, 2024 at 12:38 PM

    I like the fundamental observation here, about what a "strange" first-person narrator this is: usually the immediacy of first-person narration creates an emotional bond or connection with the perspective and views of the narrator, but in this case we often feel the opposite. And this seems deliberate on Camus's part: WE are provoked to "judge" aspects of Meursault's "strangeness" in part 1, and then we see the court do its best to render judgment on those same characteristics in part 2. But then his explosion at the chaplain seems to demolish that judgment in many ways, as we see an entirely new, emotionally intense, ENRAGED aspect of this mild-mannered and mellow French Algerian man. And in that outburst, remember, he does address his mother's death, and he insists that "no one" has the "right" to cry for her. Among other things, we realize how dicey it can be to confidently JUDGE another person's apparent shortcomings, or to suggest that he does not grieve "enough" (or demonstrably enough) for other people's satisfaction. Is the *performance* of grief necessary or essential for the grieving person? Or is this essentially a performance to assure everyone that you are "normal," that you are responding to a death in the way you are "supposed to"? Among the many other things he addresses as he unloads on the poor chaplain, he directly addresses the question of grief and challenges US to reconsider why we assume he feels nothing about his mother's death, simply because he fails or refuses to behave in the expected ways.

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  2. JoshNovember 17, 2024 at 7:46 PM

    You did a good job of pinpointing just what is unusual about Mersault's narration. The inability to relate to him that we get as readers is something that we're not used to. It's interesting how Camus's writing forces us to try and interpret meaning from an inherently meaningless story.

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