Camus and Ambiguity...

The Stranger, a philosophical novel, written by Albert Camus and published in the year 1942, is a literature that demonstrates examples of existentialism. The main character Meursault is imprisoned for murdering a man. The situation by which he becomes imprisoned is complicated. The way by which his case is treated by the prosecutor seems ironic yet absurd. There seems to be relevance to the prosecutor’s reasoning from a moral point of view, but from Meursault’s point of view, things seem much more complicated. If the other characters understood Meursault’s way of thinking, perhaps he would have received a different sentence than to be put to death. Meursault remains true to his experience and reasoning, and therefore loses his freedom.

I find this text to be important for the philosophical examples of existentialism, and to help readers understand the character’s mind, but I also find that part of the beauty of this literature is the description in Albert Camus’ writing. There is elegance to the mind of his character Meursault that is rare and possibly difficult to appreciate by most audiences. To start, Meursault is an Atheist. I think it is Meursault’s frankness that may shock some believers of God, yet the personality traits that describe Meursault would not be bitter or cynical. Instead, I find him to be sentimental and strongly appreciative of life. I’m interested in how this complex character holds confidence in being an independent thinker, no matter how isolated he becomes. He seems to find freedom within his imagination and his reasoning.



…When I was first imprisoned, the hardest thing was that my thoughts were still those of a free man. For example, I would suddenly have the urge to be on a beach and to walk down to the water. As I imagined the sound of the first waves under my feet, my body entering the water and the sense of relief it would give me, all of a sudden I would feel just how closed in I was by the walls of my cell. But that lasted only a few months. Afterwards my thoughts were those of a prisoner. I waited for the daily walk, which I took in the courtyard, or for a visit from my lawyer. The rest of the time I managed pretty well. At the time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowering overhead, little by little I would have gotten use to it. I would have waited for birds to fly by or clouds to mingle, just as here I waited to see my lawyer’s ties and just as, in another world, I used to wait patiently until Saturday to hold Marie’s body in my arms. Now, as I think back on it, I wasn’t in a hollow tree trunk. There were others worse off than me. Anyway, it was one of Maman’s (Mother’s) ideas, and she often repeated it, that after a while you could get use to anything. (Part 2, Chapter 2, Pages 73-74).

…Eventually, once I learned how to remember things, I wasn’t board at all. Sometimes I would get to thinking about my room, and in my imagination I would start at one corner and circle the room, mentally noting everything there was on the way. At first it didn’t take long. But every time I started over, it took a little longer. I would remember every piece of furniture; and on every piece of furniture, every object; and of every object, all the details; and of the details themselves-a flake, a crack, or a chipped edge-the color and the texture. At the same time I would try not to lose the thread of my inventory, to make a complete list, so that after a few weeks I could spend hours just enumerating the things that were in my room. And the more I thought about it, the more I dug out of my memory thing I had overlooked or forgotten. I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored. In a way, it was an advantage. (Part 2, Chapter 2, Pages 75-76)

While he is in jail, Meursault is visited by a priest. Upon the discovery that Meursault is atheist, the priest tries to persuade him to convert to become Christian. The priest relies on guilt and fear to be the motivating foundation for Meursault’s conversion. The priest also expresses his passionate calling to save Meursault’s soul from eternal damnation, yet the priest’s demonstration of this belief does not impress him. Meursault becomes annoyed that the priest is concerned with the lives of other people, to the degree that the priest cannot see how he himself is suffering from this calling to convert.



It was at one such moment that I once again refused to see the chaplain. I was lying down, and I could tell from the golden glow in the sky that evening was coming on. I had just denied my appeal and I could feel the steady pulse of my blood circulating inside me. I didn’t need to see the chaplain. For the first time in a long time I thought about Marie. The days have been long since she’d stopped writing. That evening I thought about it and told myself that maybe she had gotten tired of being the girlfriend of a condemned man. It also occurred to me that maybe she was sick, or dead. These things happen. How was I to know, since apart from our two bodies, now separated, there wasn’t anything to keep us together or even to remind us of each other? Anyway, after that, remembering Marie meant nothing to me. I wasn’t interested in her dead. They wouldn’t have anything more to do with me. I wasn’t even able to tell myself that it was hard to think those things.

It was at that exact moment that the chaplain came in. When I saw him I felt a little shudder go though me. He noticed it and told me not be afraid. I told him that it wasn’t his usual time. He replied that it was just a friendly visit and had nothing to do with my appeal, which he knew nothing about. He sat down on my bunk and invited me to sit next to him. I refused. All the same, there was something very gentle about him…(Part 2, Chapter 5, Pages 109-110)
But suddenly he raised his head and looked straight at me. ‘Why have you refused to see me?’ he asked. I said that I didn’t believe in God. He wanted to know if I was sure and I said that I didn’t see any reason to ask myself that question: it seemed unimportant. He then leaned back against the wall, hands flat on his thighs. Almost as if it wasn’t me he was talking to, he remarked that sometimes we think we’re sure when in fact we’re not. I didn’t say anything. He looked at me and asked, ‘What do you think?’ I said it was possible. In any case, I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t. And it just so happened that what he was talking about didn’t interest me.
He looked away and without moving asked me if I wasn’t talking that way out of extreme despair. I explained to him that I wasn’t desperate. I was just afraid, which was only natural. “then God can help you,’ he said. ‘Every man I have known in your position has turned to Him.’ I acknowledged that that was their right. It also meant that they must have had the time for it. As for me, I didn’t want anybody’s help, and I just didn’t have the time to interest myself in what didn’t interest me.



At that point he threw up his hands in annoyance but then sat forward and smothered out the folds of his cassock. When he had finished he started in again, addressing me as ‘my friend.’ If he was talking to me this way, it wasn’t because I was condemned to die; the way he saw it, we were all condemned to die. But I interrupted him by saying that it wasn’t the same thing and that besides, it wouldn’t be a consolation anyway. ‘Certainly,’ he agreed. ‘But if you don’t die today, you’ll die tomorrow, or the next day. And then the same question will arise. How will you face that terrifying ordeal?’ I said I would face it exactly as I was facing it now.
At that he stood up and looked me straight in the eye. It was a game I knew well. I played it a lot with Emmanuel and Celeste and usually they were the ones who looked away. The chaplain knew the game well too, I could tell right away: his gaze never faltered. And his voice didn’t falter, either, when he said, “Have you no hope at all? And do you really live with the thought that when you die, you die, and nothing remains?’ ‘Yes,’ I said.

Then he lowered his head and sat back down. He told me that he pitied me. He thought it was more than a man could bear. I didn’t feel anything except that he was beginning to annoy me. Then I turned away and went and stood under the skylight. I leaned my shoulder against the wall. Without really following what he was saying, I heard him start asking me questions again. He was talking in an agitated, urgent voice. I could see that he was genuinely upset, so I listened more closely.

He was expressing his certainty that my appeal would be granted, but I was carrying the burden of a sin from which I had to free myself. According to him, human justice was nothing and divine justice was everything. I pointed out that it was the former that had condemned me. His response was that it hadn’t washed way my sin for all that. I told him I didn’t know what a sin was. All they had told me was that I was guilty. I was guilty, I was paying for it, and nothing more could be asked of me. At that point he stood up again, and the thought occurred to me that in such a narrow cell, if he wanted to move around he didn’t have many options. He could either sit down or stand up.



I was staring at the ground. He took a step toward me and stopped, as if he didn’t dare come any closer. He looked at the sky through the bars. ‘You’re wrong, my son,’ he said. ‘More could be asked of you. And it may be asked.’ ‘And what’s that?’ ‘You could be asked to see.’ ‘See what?’

The priest gazed around my cell and answered in a voice that sounded very weary to me. ‘Every stone here sweats with suffering, I know that that. I have never looked at them without a feeling of anguish. But deep in my heart I know that the most wretched among you have seen a divine face emerge from their darkness. That is the face you are asked to see.’



This perked me up a little. I said I had been looking at the stones in these walls for months. There wasn’t anything or anyone in the world I knew better. Maybe at one time, way back, I had searched for a face in them. But the face I was looking for was as bright as the sun and the flame of desire – and it belonged to Marie. I had searched for it in vain. Now it was all over. And in any case, I’d never see anything emerge from any sweating stones.

The chaplain looked at me with a kind of sadness. I now had my back flat against the wall, and light was streaming over my forehead. He muttered a few words I didn’t catch and abruptly asked if he could embrace me. ‘No,’ I said. He turned and walked over to the wall and slowly ran his hand over it. ‘do you really love this earth as much as all that?’ he murmured. I didn’t answer.
He stood there with his back to me for quite a long time. His presence was grating and oppressive. I was just about to tell him to go, to leave me alone, when all of a sudden turning toward me, he burst out, ‘No, I refuse to believe you! I know that at one time or another you’ve wished for another life.’ I said of course I had, but it didn’t mean any more than wishing to be rich, to be able to swim faster, or to have a more nicely shaped mouth. It was all the same. But he stopped me and wanted to know how I pictured this other life. Then I shouted at him, “One where I could remember this life!’ and that’s when I told him I’d had enough. (Part 2, Chapter 5, Pages 110-14)



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. He seemed so certain about everything, didn’t he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman’s head. He wasn’t even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man. Whereas it looked as if I was the one who’d come up emptyhanded. But I was sure about me, about everything, surer than he could ever be, sure of my life and sure of death I had waiting for me. Yes, that was all I had. But at least I had as much of a hold on it as it had on me. I had been right, I was still right, I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn’t done that. I hadn’t done this thing but I had done another. And so? It was as if I had waited all this time for this moment and for the first light of this dawn to be vindicated. Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he. Throughout the whole absurd life I’d lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living. What did other people’s deaths or a mother’s love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we’re all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? Couldn’t he see, couldn’t he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. And he would be condemned too. What would it matter if he were accused of murder and then executed because he didn’t cry at his mother’s funeral? Salamo’s dog was worth just as much as his wife. The little robot woman was just as guilty as the Parisian woman Masson married, or as Marie, who had wanted me to marry her. What did it matter that Raymond was as much my friend as Celeste, who was worth a lot more than him? What did it matter that Marie now offered her lips to a new Meursault? Couldn’t he, couldn’t this condemned man see…And that from somewhere deep in my future…All the shouting had me gasping for air. But they were already tearing the chaplain from my grip and the guards were threatening me. He calmed them, though, and looked at me for a moment without saying anything. His eyes were full of tears. Then he turned and disappeared.




With him gone, I was able to calm down again. I was exhausted and threw myself on my bunk. I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up with the stars in my face. Sounds of the countryside were drifting in. Smells of night, earth, and salt air were cooling my temples. The wondrous peace of that sleeping summer flowed through me like a tide. Then, in the dark hour before dawn, sirens blasted. They were announcing departures for a world that now and forever meant nothing to me. For the first time in a long time I thought about Maman (Mother). I felt as if I understood why at the end of her life she had taken a ‘fiance,’ why she had played at beginning again. Even there, in that home where lives were fading out, evening was a kind of wistful respite. So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it again. Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her. And I felt ready to live it all again too. As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself-so like a brother, really – I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators that day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate. (Part 2, Chapter 5, Pages 114-117)

Although I do not share all of the same views as the character Meursault, I find his logic inspiring. I think it is something to be considered, although not always accepted, but considered none the less. I am fascinated by he discovers happiness in his thoughts and I am absorbed in the sentimental description of the text. The images throughout the writing, are ones I produced, inspired from this novel. They are intended to be expressions of my own emotional response to seemingly absurd moments of my current life.

The images were show with a low dept-of-field to create soft and blurry edges that would establish the ambiguity, and serve as metaphor for the strange emotions of the experience while photographing. There is also a subtle intention that the texture of fabrics influence the viewers physical response to seeing a figure oddly gestured coupled with soft materials.