The Stranger: Part 1, Chapter 6
TGC Blog | May 29, 2012
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Plot summary: This chapter is by far the longest we've read in The Stranger. It is also the turning point in the plot (not to be confused with the climax). The chapter narrates what happens on the Sunday that Meursault, Marie, and Raymond spend at the beach. An ominous note emerges while the threesome wait for the bus when they see the Arabs who have a grudge against Raymond. Raymond's friend who invited the group to his bungalow is identified as Masson. The morning is hot and uneventful, and lunch is accompanied by heavy drinking and smoking. The return to the beach is marked by even more intense heat and the appearance of Raymond's antagonists. Fisticuffs ensue, and then the troublesome Arabs disappear, followed by more heat. "Raymond's man" reappears, and Meursault, who carries Raymond's gun, shoots the Arab five times.
Looking Backward
So much happens in this packed chapter that it is hard to know where to begin. The story takes a surprise twist, with more surprises to follow in part two. In a story that takes a fateful turn halfway through, it is important to stop and take stock of what has happened up to the turning point. This is especially appropriate in a murder story, where it is standard practice to track backward in search for an explanation of the murder. Additionally, in this story, at Meursault's trial the prosecutor and jury will claim that Meursault was a murderer at heart long before he pulled the trigger five times.
So as readers we need to ask if anything in the first five chapters would lead us to suspect that Meursault would murder. I propose that we do not. If anything, Meursault existed in our imaginations as an unduly passive person. He is a modern-day pagan, devoid of spiritual sensitivities and preoccupied with physical life. His neighbors would probably tell an investigating policeman that he was basically a good person---a little odd, to be sure, but certainly not someone who might be expected to carry a gun and shoot someone to death.
This is not to deny that once the murder has been committed a clinical counselor or detective might draw negative conclusions about the data with which we as readers have been presented in the first five chapters. But that is hindsight and requires reinterpreting the data in light of the fact that a crime has been committed. For the moment, my focus is on what we have been led to expect before the fateful Sunday.
For reflection or discussion: I have tipped my hand on the question of whether we have been given prior information that might account for Meursault's crime; my readers might reach other conclusions. Should someone have called Meursault to the attention of the police before the Sunday in question?
Murder Story
At a descriptive level, chapter six should be scrutinized and enjoyed as an archetypal murder story (one of the best, in my view). A good murder story takes readers through the experiences as the murderer undergoes them. The writer in this genre must tell us enough to make the murder suitably vivid in our imagination. I tell my students that the first obligation for readers is to relive the text (in this case a story) as fully as possible. As we read or reread chapter six, we need to luxuriate in the details that Camus invented for us.
Then as we become more analytic we can start to arrange the individual details into a hierarchy of importance. All the invented details help us relive the event, but some of the details have more influence on the eventual murder. Alternatively, if we decide that none of the details rises to the level of being more determinative than others, that, too, might explain the murder.
Most real-life murders we read about in the newspaper or see covered on television boil down to interpersonal relations and motivations arising from those relationships, such as thwarted love or greed. Or, if the crime is committed against a stranger, at least we can see motivations such as robbery, cover-up to rape, or payment for a "hit." It is natural, therefore, to comb chapter six looking for conventional motivations for murder. When we do, I believe we come up empty.
But we learn a lot from the physical sensations that dominate Meursault's Sunday. The sun and heat are obviously major "players" in the drama. So is the excessive drinking and smoking at lunchtime. At a key moment Meursault is desperate to reach a certain stream of cool water. The presence of a stalking antagonist naturally unnerves Meursault. Of course the stalking Arab draws a knife, but it is less the threat of attack than the piercing light glinting off the knife's blade that produces the gun shot. If we grant the premise that Camus wants us to experience the murder as primarily caused by physical sensations, we can admire the skill with which Camus managed the feat. Certainly the murder itself is expressed as a riot of sensations, in writing so dense with imagery that it ranks as poetic prose.
For reflection or discussion: At the level of narrative and descriptive technique, what do you like best about Camus's writing in this chapter? If you imagine yourself to be a creative writing teacher and chapter six were turned in to you, what would you praise? Then as you shift from your role as a hypothetical writing teacher to that of a hypothetical detective who has been handed this homicide, what are your tentative conclusions about how the murder happened? What would you say to the chief of police or local media? Additionally, we can build bridges to our own life and times. We read or hear about murders nearly every day; what light does this fictional murder shed on real-life murders? Finally, we should never lose sight of the fact that literature presents universal human experience for our contemplation; what features of your experience do you see in heightened form in this chapter (experiences such as the oppressive effect of immediate physical environment)?
What Camus Really Does in This Chapter
I tell my students that great writers do not bypass what the general populace wants in a story. They simply do something more profound with the conventions. As intimated in my commentary, at the surface level Camus gives us all of the conventional and sensational details of a murder story. As a murder story it is a cut above the usual television detective drama, with more subtlety in the telling. But Camus did not bang out chapter six on his typewriter primarily to entertain us with a skillfully crafted murder story.
So what did Camus really intend with chapter six? Camus composed The Stranger as a writer of social protest. He had grievances against modern society. We must remember the extreme poverty in which Camus grew up in Algiers. Camus was also a philosopher with a particular bent toward a view of life called absurdism. It can be assumed that Camus despised the status quo of modern life and the conventionally minded people who adapted their expectations to what modern life afforded them. Camus was also an existentialist with a strong commitment to individualism and the revolt of the individual against society.
Additionally, I want to revisit the commentary that Camus himself made on this story in the preface to an American edition of the book (as noted in an earlier posting). Here is what Camus said about his protagonist:
The hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game. In this respect he is foreign to the society in which he lives. . . . He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings, and immediately society feels threatened. . . . One would therefore not be much mistaken to read The Stranger as the story of a man who, without any heroics, agrees to die for the truth (Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed. Philip Thody, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy, Alfred A. Knop, 1968, pp. 335-337).
In the same preface, Camus makes the preposterous claim that "in our society any man who does not weep at his mother's funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death." The statement is obviously hyperbolic, but the literary imagination always heightens the issues with which it engages. Camus seems to have taken on the challenge to compose a story in which society would condemn a man for not weeping at his mother's funeral. He accordingly composed a story of an "innocent" murder devoid of any conventional motivation. What Camus needs is something to land his protagonist in the courtroom, where in fact he is convicted of murder for reasons other than murdering.
So we reread chapter six to see the homicide is devoid of conventional motivation. We should particularly scrutinize the last two pages, where actual murder occurs. The sentence that narrates Meursault's pulling of the trigger is famous. Pulling the trigger is handled in such a way as to remove the element of volition on Meursault's part: "The trigger gave." That's absurd, we protest, which is exactly Camus's strategy in this absurdist novel.
Having mentioned Camus's absurdist hero, I also need to flag two sentences that might otherwise whirr past us. One is Meursault's conclusion that "just then it crossed my mind that one might fire, or not fire---and it would come to absolutely the same thing" (Gilbert translation; Ward translation: "It was then that I realized that you could either shoot or not shoot"). A little later we read, "To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing." Here is the return of Meursault's inability to arrange life into a hierarchy and to attach normal human meaning to events (all of which assume an equal importance in Meursault's mind).
For reflection or discussion: In a chapter so dense with sensory images, it would appear on the surface that Meursault acted with full volition and awareness of what he was doing. Running counter to that motif, though, is the idea of a murder that happens without human volition; what passages or details fill out this pattern, culminating in statement that the trigger that simply "gave"? And how does the chapter reinforce the picture of an absurd hero? This chapter takes us through the events leading up to the murder in such a way that we are led to feel that the murder had a certain logic to it; what is that logic?
Looking Forward
Even if we are familiar with this story and already know what happens in part two, it is important that we reach tentative conclusions about what should happen to Meursault now that he has murdered. We need to temporarily exclude from consideration what happens at Meursault's trial. Obviously Meursault needs to be arrested and brought to trial for having murdered someone. Witnesses at the trial can be expected to say something about extenuating circumstances that help to explain how the murder happened. Perhaps a psychological profile will clarify Meursault's pathological inability to attach normal emotion to what happens in his life. Such a profile on the one hand might be the basis for leniency, since Merusault is by nature a passive personality who poses no threat to society, but on the other hand he might seem like a psychopath who feels no regret for wrongdoing. In any case, Meursault will ultimately be convicted on the basis of his having pulled the trigger of a pistol.
For reflection or discussion: Perhaps your own tentative conclusions about the normal course of events that might now be expected to follow will differ from what I've offered. Additionally, you might profitably predict what will happen in Meursault's mind now that he has (in his own words at the end of the chapter) knocked "on the door of my undoing (Gilbert translation; Ward: "door of unhappiness").
Comments:
May 31, 2012 at 02:00 AM
It almost feels like a let down that he ends up murdering not in defense of Raymond, or even in defending himself, but in response to physical sensations (e.g. the sun beating down, the salty sweat in his eyes, etc.). I noticed that for all his indifference, the sun seems to be the only thing so far in the book that seems to actually affect Meursault. Does the sun stand for anything in Camus?
May 30, 2012 at 09:00 AM
Conspicuous by its absence is any thought given to the man who was murdered. No commentary on his life or the value of his life or it being just as good as any other. While Meursault may contend we are all going to die someday, this logic did not lead him to pull the trigger on himself when the sun's glaze grew blinding. "One life is as good as another, but some lives are more good than others: perhaps to borrow thematically from Orwell's Animal Farm.
Meursault later states he thought his case was "pretty simple." It is very simple. He murdered someone. He may be the victim of the trigger giving, but he does not offer this as a defense of the outcome post-event.
It is striking how absent the concrete, tangible fact of the murder is entirely abandoned by any and all characters in the second half of this novel.
The "why?" is the trial. The motives, explanations, the desire for us to attach some meaning or formula to how it all added up is the fascination and frustration with the rest of this novel. Camus offers none and does not even offer an explanation as to why (ironically).
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On a side note, do you have a book picked out after you have worked through the Stranger? May I recommend "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Wilde? I know there is more to this book that I could glean if guided through it by someone gifted in theology and literature. Just a suggestion. Please consider it. Or if you have any accute, condensed wisdom, please pass it on to me directly. Thank you sir.
http://onceforalldelivered.blogspot.com/
May 30, 2012 at 08:44 AM
The words "To go or to stay" -- "To shoot or not shoot" appear to be betrayed by Merusault's own confession in the last words of chapter six when Merusault explained - "And each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing."
So although, he seemed to say a few times already, "any life is as good as the next." Here he admits in these words "maybe that just ain't so." Also prior to the murder, he was beginning to think he might just like Marie for his wife after all. I'm guessing now that opportunity is lost forever.
Last thought - as I remember reading the very brief last moments leading up the murder, the author left a confused memory in my own head, like I felt what Merusault felt, blinded by the eye-scarring sun reflected by the knife blade, head-aching, salty-sweat blinding, "the cymbals of the sun clashing on my skull" arghh - how could he not but pull the trigger with such BLINDING PAINFUL CONFUSION suffocating, choking, aching. I suppose that's how Camus wanted us to feel - like Merusault must have felt. I had to reread those words describing this confusion - all memory could show me was the man was in a blind confusion and somehow I can taste what he was experiencing, blindly confused - seeing but not seeing - "what just happened? - Did he shoot that guy? how?? why??"
Pretty good trick! That Camus.
June 6, 2012 at 04:16 PM
I don't think anyone in the book could have called Meursault to the attention of the police before Sunday, but I do think the reader shouldn't be surprised by the murder. Meursault seems to be a psycopath with how he can't connect with emotion. "The Stranger" was published before this became a mental disorder, but I wonder what Camus would have done with his absurdist hero once he'd been labeled with a personality disorder. Meursault may lack a motive, but he certainly shouldn't surprise us since he definitely has the disposition. In saying this, I don't condemn him for not weeping at his mother's funeral. I am just pointing out that his personality is in keeping with the profile of a murderer.
The setting gives us no clue that the murder is going to take place. He doesn't even have a motive and he doesn't actually shoot someone in the conventional sense. He just pulls a trigger. Someone happens to die. As someone already pointed out, he just gets overwhelmed with the heat and the trigger gives.
I think so far this is the chapter where I'm most impressed with Camus's writing. Up until now the realism has seemed meticulous to a fault and I grew almost a little bored with Meursault as much as I didn't like his inability to feel. I found this piece particularly fascinating: "I knew I'd shattered the balance of the day, the spacious calm of this beach on which I had been happy. But I fired four shots more...And each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing." *shivers* I also found it chilling when Meursault chose not to shoot beforehand, it was merely a random decision. He could have just as easily killed him then and it would have been no different.
June 5, 2012 at 09:26 PM
[...] far, they have posted up to Part 1, Chapter 6. The chapter analyses are spaced apart to give each of the readers time to finish each [...]
June 19, 2012 at 10:00 PM
[...] Part 1, Chapter 6 [...]
June 17, 2012 at 10:10 PM
The beginning of these comments talked about inconsistencies in Camus' character. This is true because no one can live out consistently ones worldview that isn't Christian. You always have to borrow from the standard that Christianity supplies. " The Stranger" could not be written and acclaimed without this standard. Why did he pick murder as the crime and not make a crime out of pulling feathers out of his mattress? You can only be so absurd within God's universe without borrowing from His standards or at least rubbing up against them.
June 13, 2012 at 12:56 AM
I often tell my sons when they are writing, show don't tell. Camus shows mastery of this in Chapter 6. His tropes are poignant. I could walk through the chapter as if I were there. I think the following are some of Camus' best: "The glare of the morning sun hit me in the eyes like a clenched fist." "In the distance he (Masson)looked enormous, like a stranded whale." "She (Marie) was glistening with brine." "He (Raymond) could hardly get the words out, as the blood from his other wound made bubbles in his mouth." "One could see his (Arab's) dungarees steaming in the heat." "I was conscious only of the cymbals of the sun clashing on my skull..."
The end of the chapter sounds apocalyptic, end of the world terminology. "It" describes the first "crisp" sound followed by shaking off the blinding sweat. He has taken off the veil of light and exchanged life under the sun for life of perpetual shade.
June 13, 2012 at 12:24 AM
Sue, if circumstances are to be blamed, Meursault's mind must be disengaged from this act. But, to be fair, I must admit something. It was very hot last week where we live. And after a long, squelching hot, exhausting day of food shopping at the open bazaar, I found myself annoyed, even angry, at the pedestrians sauntering across the crosswalk when all I wanted was to drive home and be refreshed. Meursault immediately came to mind. The heat of the sun was maddening, and I could sympathize; yet I could give a name to my reaction - sin.
June 13, 2012 at 12:00 AM
Loren, I love your reference to vanilla or chocolate. If Camus is right, why are we shocked when Stalin and Hitler choose chocolate? There is no logic in the motive, yet I find that one of the conspicuous themes of the novel. Meursault reacts. Nothing is premeditated. His actions are innate, instinctive, mere reflexes --- yawns and hiccups and sneezes. The sun made him do it. Another chapter of excuses for crimes that he says don't even exist.
June 12, 2012 at 11:48 PM
Luma, I can hardly stop myself from considering the sun as representing the Lord in the novel considering its perpetual presence and work. It is the antagonist. It is the clenched fist that hits Meursault in the morning. It is hard and metallic. Its reflection is black. But then Meursault basks in it, and it makes him feel better. He gazes up at it, and its warmth causes him to fall off to sleep on the beach beside Marie. But it can't be trusted --- it glares; it sears; it bakes; it suffocates; it beats down; it numbs; it dulls; it burns; it makes Meursault's world a hell; its light brings Meursault darkness. Meursault battles the sun. He clenches his fist and grits his teeth, yet it will have its way with him and bring about his doom.. He can't win.
June 12, 2012 at 11:19 PM
Todd, I also noticed Camus' treatment of the Arabs. Arabs are grouped together --- there are no names given them, even though one is the brother of Raymond's mistress. "These people" stare at others like inanimate objects; they lounge. They don't speak; they slither away like lizards. They make irritating music; they run away. The Arabs at the bus stop had looked at Meursault's party as stones, but it will be Meursault who will shoot one stone dead. To fire or not fire would come to the same thing. The Arab grinned; the Arab's eyes were glowing, almost demon-like.
June 12, 2012 at 10:49 PM
Scott, I also noticed Camus' inconsistencies in this chapter --- two of which you pointed out. Being at equilibrium, unruined, is better than shattered balance and being undone. One life is not as good as another. Also, Meursault contemplating marrying Marie is a confession that that covenant is not absolutely meaningless. Another baffling contradiction is the role of the sun. It alternately blesses and curses. It is the ever-present actor defining his paradise and perdition.
June 1, 2012 at 08:58 AM
I have to admit that I was surprised when Meursault committed the murder. There wasn't any motive developed that would tip you off, under a normal progression of circumstances, as to the purpose for the murder. Jealously, anger, money -- it just isn't evident why Meursault would violate one of the 10 commandments without a compelling reason. Oh yeah, I forgot, for Meursault killing another human being is like choosing vanilla over chocolate. It doesn't matter. I am sure he found the murder "interesting".
At the same time however, shortly after I read the chapter it dawned on me that his act is the logical outcome for someone with his philosphical bent. It made me think of Dostoyevsky and his view that if one believes there is no God you become a moral relativist thinking that any act, no matter how heinous or repulsive to others, cannot be condemned. Meursault's view of the world does not value life and logically ends in suicide. Perhaps the suicide will come later in the book.
Meursault's perspective is playing out in our culture today. Once moral absolutes are pushed aside human life becomes worthless. I am sure Meursault would feel very comfortable in current American culture. Rather, it is the Christian, with his belief in God, right and wrong and ultimate accountabilty to his Creator that feels he is the one living in the "Theater of the Absurd".
June 1, 2012 at 03:41 PM
As a reader of a number of murder mysteries, I was suprised by the turn of events Mersault doesn't seem to be personally connected to the events around him.
July 11, 2012 at 09:44 PM
[...] Part 1, Chapter 6 [...]
February 10, 2013 at 07:08 AM
[...] Part 1, Chapter 6 [...]
paley
May 31, 2012 at 06:41 PM
As with the other chapters, Meursault seems to be tossed this way and that by life's circumstances (which are absurd). His responses - or the lack of them - make him seem a little less than human. In the story to shoot or not to shoot doesn't seem to make any difference. To portray Meursault as a man who is willing to die for the truth is ridiculous. Indeed within the story, where is the truth?