Friday, January 27, 2012
The Stranger
Meursault's death sentence wasn't so much his inability to communicate, as it was his inability to lie or "tell more than is true." Although there were times he struggled to express what he wanted, first to come to mind is probably, "Fumbling a little with my words and realizing how ridiculous I sounded, I blurted out that it was because of the sun" (Camus 103), they didn't really significantly impact his sentence. Even if he could have found the right words, they wouldn't have helped him. There really isn't a way to explain why he killed the Arab. Even hearing his thoughts in the moment it's unclear, and in the end the trial wasn't really about the murder, but about his character. I suppose that words helped the prosecutor, who Meursault noticed was better than his attorney, but Meursault didn't give his attorney much to work with anyway. The only point that Meursault's words really stood out and may have empowered him, in a way, is at the very end. When he snaps and starts yelling at the Chamberlain,this leads him to a revelation, "I felt ready to live again too. As if that blind rage had wasted me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time in that night alive with signs of 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" (Camus 123). I'm not sure that the revelation really empowered him though, because he feels insignificant regardless of anything he could say or do. Life goes on, and the world doesn't care about anything so why should he. As such, it's difficult to say he found much in communication at all, even his burst of anger wasn't really about the words he was saying or about communicating his meaning to the Chamberlain. It was just him really thinking aloud, in order to conclude, and understand his feelings about his approaching sentence.
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Hi, Jordan.
ReplyDeleteYour big idea seems to elude Merseault, who seems clumsy with language and not that interested in its potential powers for self-revelation. He does seem, at the end, to wake up a bit, as you say, and understand himself a little better. It's a shame that his own indifference meant that it took literally a death sentence to get him to think about the value of his own life, and the life of the one he casually killed. It's interesting what you say about the trial, because trials are all about the language, and who uses it more skillfully. The trial is a good metaphor for the judgment we all sometimes face, but perhaps one of the messages of the book, intended or not, is that indifference is a kind of judgment itself, and can result in terrible consequences, just as passionate emotions might. Good struggle with this strange book.