Reading Meursault
Read the novel as a diptych, from the funeral and the beach to the trial and the last night, and ask what the court condemns in Meursault.
An original introduction. This guide accompanies the work; it is neither the complete text nor a translation.
Situating the text
Sketched from 1938, completed in Paris in May 1940 and published by Gallimard in June 1942, the novel forms the cycle of the absurd with The Myth of Sisyphus and Caligula. Its flat first-person narration in the compound past owes much to American fiction; Sartre devoted a famous essay to it in 1943. Postcolonial critics have questioned the namelessness of the victim, and Kamel Daoud answered it in 2013 with a novel narrated by the dead man’s brother. Meursault, a clerk in Algiers, learns of his mother’s death, attends her funeral without showing the expected grief, begins an affair with Marie the next day and, drawn into a neighbour’s quarrel, shoots an Arab on a beach blinded by the sun. The second part follows his imprisonment and trial, where the court judges less the killing than his indifference, and ends with his refusal of the chaplain and his opening to the tender indifference of the world.
Following the arguments
A flat voice : Short sentences in the compound past record sensations and acts without explaining them, so the reader meets the world as Meursault does, without inner commentary. The trial : The prosecution turns his calm at the funeral into proof of a criminal soul; as Camus later put it, any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral risks being condemned to death. The indifference of the world : Facing execution, Meursault rejects all consolation and feels happy in a world that does not care for him, an absurd lucidity rather than despair.
Continuing the reading
Read the two parts as a diptych, noting how the second rewrites the events of the first in the language of the court, and then read the 1955 preface Camus wrote for the American edition. Sketched from 1938, completed in Paris in May 1940 and published by Gallimard in June 1942, the novel forms the cycle of the absurd with The Myth of Sisyphus and Caligula. Its flat first-person narration in the compound past owes much to American fiction; Sartre devoted a famous essay to it in 1943. Postcolonial critics have questioned the namelessness of the victim, and Kamel Daoud answered it in 2013 with a novel narrated by the dead man’s brother.
Meursault is condemned for refusing to play the game of expected feelings; the novel exposes that social demand while leaving its victim voiceless.
Your turn to think.
- Why does the trial dwell on Meursault’s behaviour at his mother’s funeral rather than on the killing itself?
- What changes in how we read the book once we notice that the man Meursault kills is never given a name?
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