Meursault at the Window

For some readers of The Stranger, Meursault’s humanity is in question from the start of the novel. His lack of emotional expressiveness has led some to wonder whether he might be a sociopath. And at the trial, the prosecutor seems to sum up this general view, describing him memorably as “an abyss threatening to swallow up society,” and he concludes that Meursault “didn't have a soul and that nothing human, not one of the moral principles that govern men's hearts, was within [his] reach” (101). Paradoxically, our ability to perceive Meursault’s humanity might be bolstered by his account of being on trial, where the very question of whether he’s a fully fledged member of society or some kind of “antichrist” or “monster” is explicitly judged. Readers who earlier had been put off—or at least unnerved and deeply weirded out—by his emotional detachment at his mother’s funeral, his hedonistic weekend upon returning home, and his staunch refusal to pass judgment on either Salamano and his dog or, more troublingly, Raymond and his “mistress” now bristle at the court’s treatment of him. Meursault’s response to feeling “hated” by the crowd, when his behavior at the funeral is scrutinized, is one of the most familiarly human responses we see from him in the novel. In the face of the prosecutor’s visible “glee” at the director’s testimony, Meursault admits that “for the first time in years I had this stupid urge to cry, because I could feel how much all these people hated me” (89-90). We’re back on the school playground, and the outsider or oddball is being picked on by the smug, self-righteous, and comfortably “normal” crowd. He feels their hatred and wants to cry, but he holds it in.

There’s something compellingly helpless (or, despite his guilt in terms of the crime with which he is charged, “innocent”) about Meursault in the dock, subject to the scrutinizing gaze of the jury—even as he refuses to do or say anything in his own defense—that rouses our sympathies. There’s something sweet about Celeste’s testimony, in which he flatly defends Meursault’s humanity (“he was a man . . . everyone knew what that meant” [92]), and something moving about Meursault’s remark that, upon hearing his character thus defended by the guy whose restaurant he frequented, “it was the first time in my life I ever wanted to kiss a man” (93). Given Meursault’s oddly passive narration of the crime itself in chapter 6, Celeste isn’t too far off when he testifies, “The way I see it, it’s bad luck. Everybody knows what bad luck is. It leaves you defenseless” (92). The prosecutor’s narrative “ha[s] a certain consistency,” as Meursault himself admits; “What he was saying was plausible” (99). But readers know that Meursault’s crime is not in fact “plausible” but absurd—it can’t be accounted for in a conventional narrative of revenge or self-defense. It literally makes no sense. When he testifies that he did not return to the spring “intending” to kill the Arab (88), we know this to be true; and when he fumblingly attempts to explain, “realizing how ridiculous I sounded,” that “it was because of the sun” (103), we realize that this is as good an “explanation” as any. Throughout this trial, even readers who are alienated by Meursault throughout the first part, and especially when he’s pulling the trigger and ending a man’s life for no coherent reason, are overwhelmed by the sense that he’s being misunderstood—that this whole “machinery of justice” is overlooking something essential about him.

Is Meursault a “man” and not a monster, as Celeste insists? Does “everybody know what that means”? Does it mean, for example, that he must exhibit the socially acceptable (and expected) outward indications of grief at his mother’s funeral, or respond in kind to his girlfriend’s declaration of love, or express (and feel) remorse at his crime? How essential is emotion, or empathy, to our definition of humanity? Does his failure to enact the culturally specific rituals of mourning at his mother’s funeral, for example, make him “less human” than the upstanding gentlemen of the jury, as the prosecutor strongly implies? The caretaker offers Meursault coffee with milk, which he accepts; Meursault responds by offering him a cigarette—do you agree with the prosecutor’s confident assertion that this basic and rather cordial social interaction is evidence of soullessness? Before we are too hasty to insist upon empathy as a baseline requirement for human status, remember that some people on the autism spectrum are characterized by a cognitive inability to perceive and adequately respond to signs of emotion in others—once we start handing out “humanity cards” to some people and not others, things can get pretty sketchy. Meursault may be a rather “strange” man, as the title suggests and as Marie herself points out; but I tend to agree with Celeste. He is a man.

Meursault’s humanity is most evident to me in the striking moments of sheer joy in his narrative—his descriptions of swimming in the sea with Marie, playing simple, childlike games together in the waves; or running to take a “flying leap” onto the back of the moving truck with his buddy Emmanuel (“all I was conscious of was the sensation of hurtling forward in a mad dash through cranes and winches. . . . Emmanuel was laughing so hard he could hardly breathe” [26]). And once he’s in the custody of the police, the most poignant moments for me are the fleeting references to the world outside of this dehumanizing “machinery of justice”:

            As I was leaving the courthouse on my way back to the van, I recognized

            for a brief moment the smell and color of the summer evening. In the

            darkness of my mobile prison I could make out one by one, as if from

            the depths of my exhaustion, all the familiar sounds of a town I loved and

            of a certain time of day when I used to feel happy. The cries of the
            newspaper vendors in the already languid air, the last few birds in the
            square, the shouts of the sandwich sellers, the screech of the streetcars
            turning sharply through the upper town, and that hum in the sky before
            night engulfs the port. (97)

Or, at the very moment that his lawyer is making his futile argument on the basis of which his fate hinges, and he hears “an ice cream vendor blowing his tin trumpet out in the street. I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn’t mine anymore, but one in which I’d found the simplest and most lasting joys: the smells of summer, the part of town I loved, a certain evening sky, Marie’s dresses and the way she laughed” (104). Such things might not be enough to make life meaningful in the metaphysical sense, but they emphasize how acutely Meursault is alive, and I balk at judging his delight in such “simple and lasting joys” as somehow less than human.

The title of this post alludes to the “small window” in Meursault’s cell from which he can, in what for him must be a particularly tortuous coincidence, glimpse the sea in the distance. Elsewhere he mentions in passing how, when the guard informs him that Marie has come to visit, he had been “gripping the bars, my face straining toward the light” (73). Meursault’s confinement makes him painfully aware of all he has lost. Compare this image of him “straining toward the light” at his barred prison-cell window to the earlier scene in part 1, where he spends the entire Sunday afternoon and evening sitting on his balcony observing the street scene below. In both, we might say, he isn’t quite a part of life—he’s been cut off, estranged, even alienated from “society” since the start of the novel. But in the earlier scene he is free to “[sit] there for a long time and [watch] the sky” (23). At the end of the novel, where in his new cell on death row he can only see the sky—his world reduced to a small square of light—he feels acutely the loss of his freedom. This seems to me an unambiguously human response to incarceration. The humanity may simply be harder for others to see.