The Stranger by Albert Camus was published in 1942 when the author was twenty-nine years old. The setting of the novel is Camus' beloved Algierswhere he grew up in the poor, working-class, Belcourt section. In many ways the main character, Meursault, is typical of the Algerian youths Camus knew. Like them, and like Camus himself, Meursault was in love with the sun and the sea. His life is devoted to appreciating physical sensations. He seems so devoid of any emotions as to appear traumatized or child-like. Something in Meursaul
t's character has powerfully appealed primarily to young people, though certainly not only them, since the book's publication. Is he an absurd anti-hero? Is he a moral monster? Is he a rebel against a conventional morality? Critics and readers alike have disputed a variety of approaches to Meursault. I believe he is the embryo of Camus' metaphysical rebel as articulated in the philosophical essay, The Rebel. He is the man who says by his actions, "I will go this far, but no farther."

In order to understand Meursault's rebellion we must first understand the nature of his personality as portrayed by Camus. The novel begins with the laconic assertion "Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure." His mother's death briefly interrupts the pleasant flow of Meursault's life, a life devoted to appreciating sensation. He loves the feel of a crisp towel in the washroom. He enjoys eating, drinking, and smoking cigarettes. He loves to watch the sea and the sky. Swimming and making love to pretty girls like Marie are his favorite pastimes, so much so that an offer of a job promotion in Paris does not in the least appeal to him. When something bores him or distresses him he simply goes to sleep, as he does on the bus to his mother's funeral and even in jail. He is a detached observer of life. Symbolic of this quality is the Sunday he spends watching the ebb and flow of life in his neighborhood from his apartment window. Camus describes in detail the street scenes yet never does Meursault become involved in them. Meursault is distant from the messiness of plans, ambitions, desires, hatreds, even love. Marie's protestations of love only puzzle him. When she asks him if he wishes to marry her he agrees only because he sees no real reason to refuse. He helps in Raymond's nefarious schemes for equally bland reasons, and also because Raymond plies him with food, drink, and cigarettes. He is even distant from his own trial. It interests him because he has never seen a trial before.

This easy-going, pleasant hedonism is interrupted permanently by Meursault's murder of the Arab on the beach. Not only is he incarcerated, but also he must examine the reality behind the illusion of his trial and, ultimately, of his life. Introspection has not been his metier. It takes him a while to realize that the judge, the jury, the journalists, even his own lawyer, do not wish him well. Meursault finally realizes that he is going to be convicted, not because he killed an Arab but because he did not mourn his mother's death.

During the trial, conventional morality is satirized. The Public Prosecutor's convoluted logic equates Meursault's lack of emotion of his mother's death to symbolic matricide and even to actual parricide. As foolish and bizarre as this reasoning is perhaps there is a kernel of truth to it. Meursault has neither parents nor children. He is without a past that he cares about, nor does he have a future. He lives in the eternal present, like a child. By not concerning himself with his mother he has destroyed his past. By refusing to plan for committed relationships, like one with Marie, he negates his future. He floats along in a sea of sensation. Like Hamlet he cares not for man, nor woman either. Unlike Hamlet, extreme grief and despair has not caused this alienation--this strangeness.

Despite Meursaultís limitations he and the reader realize that his is being victimized because he has transgressed a deep-seated societal taboo. Mother love is an institutionalized and conventional ritual with real meaning for only some members of society. Young men, and now young women too, expend a good deal of energy breaking away from their mothers, who then have little influence or importance in their adult lives. This produces some guilt which is assuaged by the myth of mother love. Meursault's real crime was his honesty regarding his mother's death. He wished she had not died, but her death made no real impingement on his life other than temporarily disturbing his joyfully sensate experiences. His mother's death caused his discomfort on the bus, during the wake, and most of all during the unbearably hot burial. Curiously he recalls that discomfort as he shoots the Arab. Despite these vexations, Meursault does not blame his mother. Unlike Macbeth's response to Lady Macbeth's death, he does not say she should have died another time. Perhaps he has so little resentment because he does not force himself to fake ersatz emotions. In this he is "The Rebel." He will go to the funeral, he will wear a black tie, but he will not fake his emotions. Like the rebel conceived in Camus' later work (1954) Meursault is a liminal man. He stands on the borderline, the limit, beyond which he cannot go despite the threat of his own death.

Meursault is definitely limited in his rebellion. There are many unsavory aspects to his character. He seems to accept the French Algerian prejudices against the natives. None of the Arabs have individual names or unique personalities. He never expresses the slightest concern for the Arab he killed nor for his family. Conor Cruise O'Brien finds in this proof for Camus' own colonial prejudices against natives. However, Camus may wish to paint a character who displays this weakness. Violence does not even concern Meursault. He is indifferent to Raymond beating his girlfriend, or Salamano beating his dog. He even is willing to lie under certain circumstances. He writes the letter for Raymond which is designed to deceive the Arab girl and expose her to humiliation. Later he lies to the police to protect Raymond. Both Raymond and Celeste testify at the trial that he is a "good fellow". Marie is attractive because of her physical beauty and her readiness to make love. His rebellion against the conventions of society is a very limited one. He seems to accept his culture's attitudes toward natives and women.

In The Rebel Camus defines a rebel as "a man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes." Meursault says no to false sentimentality. He absolutely refuses to lie about his emotions even though that stand will cost him his life. He knows he is convicted of the Arab's murder because he did not mourn for his mother. Yet he does not pander to this societal expectation. His is a narrow kind of integrity, but one nonetheless. He says yes to life--to his life of sun, sea, sex, food, drink, and crisp dry towels. He is an aesthete of every day life. He neither demands nor expects anything beyond that.

Even prison is not a terrible punishment for Meursault. He learns to do without the experiences he loves, even women and cigarettes. He sleeps a great deal. He remembers the past. However, he suffers a great deal contemplating the executioner's blade. For the first time in his life he becomes introspective. The final encounter with the chaplain forces him to articulate his philosophy of life and death: "I poured out on him all the thoughts that had been simmering in my brain." Just as he refused the temptation for legal redemption during his trial, he refuses the metaphysical redemption offered by the chaplain. He is faithful to his beliefs, limited though they are. He has struggled in prison with the concept of death. Death negates all those beautiful experiences he so enjoys. The confrontation with the inevitability of death and "for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe." Death, just as life, is meaningless. The only thing that could make his death happy is to maintain his stance as a rebel, a social outcast subject to the "howls of execration" by a mob of spectators.

Meursault is a rebel, but is he a hero? Adele King sees him as a Christ figure, dying for what he believes in. She quotes Camus' famous assertion that Meursault is "the only Christ we deserve." Robert Champigny, on the other hand, sees Meursault as a pagan hero in opposition to a Christian society. According to Champigny this hero adopts an Epicurean moral code which posits that happiness consists in not suffering physically or psychically. One avoids suffering by suppressing non-natural needs, such as ambition and vanity. More positively, one seeks pleasure in an harmonious relationship with the external world. This theory would correspond with Meursault's perception of the killing of the Arab: "I knew I'd shattered the balance of the day, the spacious calm of this beach on which I had been happy." Unlike the Christian, he does not see his act as sinful but disharmonious.

Germaine Bree sees Meursault as a Billy Budd type hero. He is an innocent victim, a stranger to the conventional moral code. Conor Cruise O'Brien concludes that Meursault's narrow heroism springs from his Nietzschean integrity, an artistic integrity. He will not lie about his feelings neither to give pleasure to others nor to save them pain, nor to save his own life. O'Brien sees Meursault as indifferent to the society around him, including its social oppression of the colonized. He sees Camus as rigorous in presenting the psychology of Meursault and lax in his presentation of the society which condemned him, thus denying the colonial reality in French Algeria.

Brian Masters sees Meursault as scrupulously honest, but that is all. To him it is not enough to make Meursault admirable, and, in fact, it encourages the readers' sympathies veering toward the other characters who are frightened by his moral emptiness.

I believe that Meursault is not only Camus' metaphysical rebel, but also he is a heroic, albeit in an ambiguous manner. Like Socrates, Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. he challenges the status quo. Like the 1905 assassins he accepts the consequence of his action. Of course he is more different from these noble rebels than he is like them. Socrates, Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. operated from a transcendent moral code. Meursault does not. The 1905 assassins willed their selective murders and their own expiating deaths in order to bring about a more just society. Meursault does not. He is a very ordinary Everyman who said no to a certain kind of lie, and who said yes to the beauty of life. Perhaps in his affirmation of life Meursault is faithful to a transcendent value--an a priori belief in the significance of human nature. He is an ambiguous hero for an ambiguous age. Perhaps that is the core of Meursault's appeal to modern readers. Twentieth century events have revealed that all our heroes have clay feet. How much more comforting to have a paragon perform one noble act. Even we might be able to do that..