sometimes the sun gets in your eyes

Introduction: Retrospective reflection 

When I first sat down to work on this project, I told myself that the thesis I am about to present to you will be what I structure this essay around. It goes like this: Those who are able to set aside the intricacies of life find freedom in the knowledge that they are an outsider-- unconcerned with the burdens that come with being an emotional human being or what said beings may think of their methods of obtaining freedom-- and have a deeper feeling of content with the universe's general indifference towards all people, without any emotional obligations. After I gave this thesis out to the open arms of the universe, I knew that I had somehow forgotten the way my brain functions. There was no way I was gonna write this upsettingly lengthy blog post without finding the loose ends that the unfortunate Thesis Version 1.0 inevitably contained. So with this, I present to you the disclaimer that point A is going to end up looking very different from point B. But I don’t see this as an issue-- the only way I find myself coming to holistic and thorough conclusions is by talking myself through it. At the end of this presentation, I’ll (hopefully) have a more nuanced conclusion once my brain has been given enough time to sound the emergency alarm at every single sentence written. I only ask that you brace yourself as we embark on the analysis of The Stranger, existentialism, and interpersonal relationships. 

Part I: What is existentialism? (spoiler: it’s not the most satisfying answer)

Now, to start, we need to define existentialism. In the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Alasdair McIntyre writes that defining existentialism “would necessarily be so general and so vague as to be vacuous” and that “in the case of different philosophers this emphasis is placed in contexts so dissimilar that it is put to quite different and incompatible uses.” Long story short, even the academics who dedicate their time to reading dusty books and arguing with other dusty people over theories don’t really have an exact “formula” to discern what existentialism is or is not, and neither do the authors who are known by the masses as the spearheads of these philosophies/movements. Though this is very angering as a regular person who may be searching for information and does not have the intellectual patience of an alcoholic philosopher, it does make way for a wider application of the term. It’s considered easier to view existentialism as a group of themes rather than finding a clear cut procedure to detect it. McIntyre identifies these six key themes to be “the individual and systems; intentionality; being and absurdity; the nature and significance of choice; the role of extreme experiences; and the nature of communication.” 

Part II: Tearing apart my thesis 

With this in mind, I’d like to start dissecting my original claim. Dividing it into three sections, we first have “Those who are able to set aside the intricacies of life find freedom in the knowledge that they are an outsider”. This means that the people who don't care for all that life comes with-- naturally, being the universe-- and think, oh, that doesn't matter to me, who draw reactions from other “regular” (emotionally intelligent) people are cool with that, and kind of see not having a care or identity as part of their identity: they make it a personality trait, if you will. The thesis then continues with, “...unconcerned with the burdens that come with being an emotional human being or what said beings may think of their methods of obtaining freedom”-- basically this means that these people do not care about life or people's judgement towards their uncaring nature. And finally, “...have a deeper feeling of content with the universe's general indifference towards all people, without any emotional obligations.” This means that they are at a place in which they are understanding of the universe's gentle indifference, which I define as the acceptance that what happens in your life is kinda entirely out of your hands. If something bad happens, for example and definitely completely unrelated, let’s say you commit murder: you commit murder, and you let yourself think that it’s not your fault, that it just happened the way it happened because why shouldn’t it? Maybe the sun was in your eyes! The world is naturally emotionally tying, simply by existing. These ties bring with them moral dilemmas and varying experiences and cruelty and love (sometimes mixed in together, sometimes separate), but separating yourself from all of that awards a sort of “privileged” mind where there is no inclination to entangle oneself with those matters. 

In the first essay I wrote on The Stranger, where the thesis we just discussed comes from, is this quote: “After being condemned to death, Meursault’s lonely contemplations in his prison cell reveal to the reader the overarching conclusion that Camus comes to in The Stranger: life is meaningless, and every man who loses himself in the perils of trying to construct that meaning is a victim.” Which means, to Meursault at least, that nothing matters. Nothing matters, and wasting your time trying to understand why bad things happen to you; or preventing them from happening; or encouraging good things; is a waste of time. Meursault creates a barrier between himself and the rest of the world, where they are the foolish ones and he is the enlightened victor. He takes on this sort of holier-than-thou attitude, not to claim something so extraordinary like the possibility of Meursault taking pity upon others, but it’s hard to argue that he doesn’t see himself as the one with a better grasp on life, in comparison to the other characters that you may call his “friends''. 

Meursault has these final moments of contemplation where he’s about to be executed in a few hours and he’s waiting around in his cell, going over his life and thinking of the days that lead up to his inevitable death. He first feels rage at his circumstances and himself and takes it all out on the chaplain who attempts to harness Meursault's last hours as a method of conversion-- he believes that if he must die, it is better for him to die with the knowledge that he may be given a second chance by God. This angers Meursault even further, which prompts a lot of yelling and the eventual white-flag-waving of the chaplain. Next, he starts to feel this sense of distracting hope, cursing himself for not paying attention to instances in which people have escaped execution and haggled themselves into second chances, not bestowed upon by God or a questionable afterlife. Finally, he concedes again that he cannot work around his impending fate, and circles back to his nonchalant acceptance of his life. Coming to peace with the fact that he’s always been considered an outsider to the rest of society, he reaches this state of enlightenment which, in his mind, makes him a freer man-- because does not care, and he “never says more than he genuinely feels and refuses to conform to society’s demands” (Cruickshank). If he were to be the man who cared, in jail, facing death, he would spend his last moments in emotional turmoil, thinking about everything he doesn't want to leave behind, and fearing death because he made the mistake of allowing himself to slip into the foolishness that every other human falls victim to, or because he lied to please the finalizing judgements of the Court. He only let himself be in that emotionally vulnerable position for mere hours before realizing that it was only making him more miserable. Having all these emotions serve as a distraction from life, and the stress of it. He just accepts it, coming again to the conclusion that the world does not have an order or reason for its chaos, and that to refuse this universal fact forces oneself to be in constant despair when trying to make meaning out of the meaningless. He enjoyed sights and smells, held a job, kinda dated someone, and considered marrying her just because he wasn’t exactly opposed to it, or anything else that happened to him. You could say that he’s just living out the cards that the hands of fate have dealt him, content with the “therapeutic function” (Abbagnano) that is knowing that the only certainty in life is the end. 

Part III: Present reflection and conclusion

Now, with this all discussed, I’m going to diverge a little more into personal speculation and analysis. I think that maybe something is just different about Meursault. This is less to do with a philosophy and more to do with, well, maybe somethings just wrong with this guy. People didn't sit around and decide to start calling themselves existentialists, acting and thinking a certain way. So Meursault, though he is a fictional character, is a guy who was really just born like that, and unfortunately cannot escape. I'd argue that it would be different if, instead, he was once a man who was considered more “human”, but then was later beaten into this outage-inducing demeanor by the cruelty of the world-- because people who were beat into shape were still once vulnerable people, meaning their walls can be prodded at or broken into. But it doesn't seem that way for Meursault. This is something that confused me about The Stranger, because compared to other existentialist works, our protagonist here doesn’t seem to have had any point in his life in which one day he woke up and said damn it all. Even in other works of Camus, such as The Plague, there is a strong theme of revolution and the unwillingness to “accept this suffering passively” (Encyclopedia of World Biography Online). Quickly branching outside of literature, the film Stalker by Tarkovsky presents a story where the Professor and the Writer, two men both bored and unfulfilled with their lives despite having careers and families, journey out of their post-apocalyptic town to a more beautiful and hypothetically fulfilling “Zone”, in attempt to answer the question “what does it mean to be a human being?” (Artukoglu and Szejko). And yes, the Writer and the Professor end up leaving the Zone without the answer to that question, but at least here we have two examples of absurdist media in which the authors pushed their characters to try. Humans are naturally inclined to care for themselves and other people, be social creatures and make something of their lives, so I don’t exactly see this as Meursault doing himself a favor by just lazily following the path and not taking any chances to alter or raise objections to things as they happen to him. Note: he is in a rather submissive position, as a human being, for someone who thinks they've cashed out because they don't have any semblance of an emotional range. At his job, his boss is infuriated with him for teetering on the edge of the next level, refusing to take a higher position just ‘cause he doesn't want to. He maintains a continuously average, C-plus level of existence: not terrible but not great either. And that's just simply not a way to live.

I don't think that Meursault is cheating the system, I don't think he's pulled a fast one on the universe by accepting his crappy circumstances without refusal or question. On the contrary, he’s more so pranked himself. There's no one to remember him after he dies: his friends will always just have a distant memory of some weird guy they were once friends with who, for no apparent reason, shot an Arab guy a bunch of times. His girlfriend will think of him as a most likely embarrassing mistake, someone that she settled with because he didn’t care enough to not give her the time of day. Despite these people thinking he’s nuts for just being who he was, and him not really being pushed one way or another regardless of what they did for him, they still went out of their way to adamantly defend and forge explanations for his behavior, because they are people who live the human experience with passion and fever, and form interpersonal bonds and judgements of character with everyone they meet. Throughout his life, Meursault is the only person who seems to be consistently fine with everything, and his counterparts in the Court take on this kind of personal offense that comes with being faced with another human being who is doing something inexplicably inhuman. We are emotional creatures who are striving to make sense of this man's thought process, looking for reasons to give him a second chance, or apply tangible labels to him like innocent or monstrous, based on the human need to just throw someone into any category at all. Meursault is an enigma of a sort, and the other non zombie-like people hate to see this, because they have brains that want to make sense of things, unlike his.