Letranger
The murder of the Arab is clearly the central event of the novel. Camus
placed
it in fact right in the middle of the book. It is the last incident
recounted in
part 1, so its importance is underscored by a structural break
in the story. It
is related in one of the longer chapters, which records in
fine detail the
events of the day, even when their relevance is not obvious -
for example,
several paragraphs are devoted to describing how Marie and
Meursault frolic in
the sea. The murder marks an obvious change in
Meursault's life, from free man
to prisoner, and some more subtle associated
changes, such as his increasing
introspection and concern with memory.
Meursault himself describes the shooting
in terms that emphasise both the
destruction of a past and the start of
something new: "and there, in that
noise, sharp and deafening at the same
time, is where - 'it all started' - I
shook off the sweat and the sun. I knew
that I had shattered the harmony of
the day, the exceptional silence of a beach
where I'd been happy". This
violent crime also interrupts the routine flow
of the story. Until the
murder, nothing very dramatic has happened and nothing
dramatic seems likely
to happen. Partly, of course, this air of normality
results from the way
Meursault tells the story. His mother's death could have
been a momentous
event, but he begins the novel with the statement: 'Mother died
today. Or
maybe yesterday, I don't know'. The matter-of-fact tone and the
uncertainty
combine to make us feel that this is not a significant event. In
many stories
the first moments of love seem portentous. Of his first night with
Marie
Meursault says, 'Toward the end of the show, I gave her a kiss, but not
a
good one. She came back to my place. When I woke up, Marie had gone'. One
could
hardly be farther from romantic rapture. A few days later Meursault
agrees to
marry Marie, and that too could have been presented as a turning
point in his
life; but he relates their engagement as if it were a routine
decision: 'That
evening Marie came by to see me and asked me if I wanted to
marry her. I said it
didn't make much difference to me and that we could if
she wanted to'. In
narrating the murder itself, Meursault expresses very much
the same attitude as
he has previously; his actions have no conscious
motives. The stage is set as if
by accident, and that impression is
reinforced by the accumulation of details.
Meursault tells this day
almost moment by moment. He tells of his headache and a
bitter taste in his
mouth, of Marie's white dress and Raymond's blue trousers,
of their decision
to take a bus rather than walk. Some of the details have
symbolic functions.
Marie remarks that he has a 'funeral face', alluding both to
the funeral and
to the impending murder. They bang on the Raymond's door to
summon him,
foreshadowing the gunshot raps 'on the door of unhappiness' at the
time of
the murder. The impression that this is just another day dominates the
first
part of this chapter, right up to the first confrontation with the
Arabs.
Meursault's role in this initial fracas is very passive. He
accepts the task
assigned to him by Raymond, to stand by to help 'if another
one shows up'. He
tries to shout a warning to Raymond, but too late. In the
aftermath the three
men return to the bungalow, and Masson then takes Raymond
to a doctor, leaving
Meursault, as he puts it, 'to explain to the women
what had happened. I didn't
like having to explain to them, so I just shut
up, smoked a cigarette, and
looked at the sea'. As usual, he gives no clue as
to the content of his
thoughts, and nothing is reported of his conversation
with the two women. Masson
and Raymond return from the doctor at one thirty,
two hours after the walk first
began. Raymond is in a surly mood and
eventually announces that he is 'going
down to the beach . . . to get some
air'. Masson and Meursault both propose to
go with him, but he tells them to
mind their own business. Masson complies, but
not Meursault: 'I followed him
anyway'. This is Meursault's first rejection of
authority, almost his first
wilful act of the novel. The two men come upon the
two Arabs by a stream near
a large rock. The description becomes more and more
lyrical and mythical from
this point. The sun has grown unbearably fierce. The
Arabs are lying
peacefully by the stream, one of them playing three notes on a
reed flute.
Apart from the three notes and the tinkling water, there is total
silence and
stillness. Raymond is eager to provoke an encounter but Meursault
takes
command of the situation, eventually persuading him to 'take him on man
to
man and give me your gun'. As Raymond hands over the gun, 'we just stood
there
motionless, as if everything had closed in around us.' In this strange
suspended
state Meursault's indifference takes on alarming proportions: 'I
realized that
you could either shoot or not shoot'. As in the first
encounter, the Arabs flee,
slipping suddenly behind the rock. Meursault and
Raymond return once more to the
bungalow, and Raymond seems satisfied. But
Meursault halts at the bottom of the
stairs, unable, he says, 'to face the
effort it would take to climb the wooden
staircase and face the women again'.
He goes back to the beach and starts
walking back toward the site of the last
encounter. Only when he comes to the
rocks and the stream does he realize
that one of the Arabs is still there; in
fact, he claims he had forgotten
about the earlier incidents. Then, for a long
time the two men stand facing
each other without doing anything. Meursault is
not so passive that he fails
to recognize his freedom to choose what to do. He
knows that he could have
avoided the third confrontation; he even knew it at
then time: 'It occurred
to me that all I had to do was turn around and that
would be the end of it.
But the whole beach, throbbing in the sun, was pressing
on my back. I took a
few steps towards the spring'. And then he takes one final,
fatal step: 'It
was this burning, which I couldn't stand anymore, that made me
move forward.
I knew that it was stupid, that I wouldn't get the sun off me by
stepping
forward. But I took a step, one step, forward. And this time, without
getting
up, the Arab drew his knife and held it up to me in the sun'. Meursault
knows
that his action makes no sense; as in the previous instance, he knew it
at
the time, to the extent that he thought about it. But he did not think; he
took
one more step, in a series that goes back not just to the bungalow, but
to the
beginning of the book, for that is how Meursault has lived his life,
acting by
reflex rather than by reflection. The instant of the murder has
arrived. Aware,
at least in retrospect, of the significance of this action,
Meursault relates it
at length. Even here, he has almost nothing to say about
his own thoughts and
ideas: 'All I could feel were the cymbals of sunlight
crashing on my forehead
and, indistinctly, the dazzling spear flying up from
the knife in front of me'.
What he talks about is external - the sweat
dropping from his eyebrows, the
gleam of the knife, the glare of the sun, the
hot wind off the sea. When he
actually pulls the trigger, he phrases the
sentence so that he himself
disappears: 'The trigger gave'. After the shot,
his perspective changes
abruptly. He recognizes, first of all, that a
momentous event has occurred:
'there, in that noise, sharp and deafening
at the same time, is where it all
started'. Unlike his mother's death or his
betrothal to Marie, this deed marks a
turning point. Curiously, he regards it
as a beginning rather than an end, even
though he has lost his freedom and,
as he puts it, 'shattered the harmony of the
day, the exceptional silence of
a beach where I'd been happy'. Furthermore, he
re-establishes himself in the
active role: 'Then I fired four more times at the
motionless body where the
bullets lodged without leaving a trace'. Meursault
offers no more explanation
for the additional shots, in terms of motive, than
for any of his previous
actions. The act itself still belongs to his habitual
pattern of behavior -
impulsive, instinctive, unconscious. It is easy enough to
imagine reasons for
Meursault's behavior. It seems probable that his macho
attitude and
unacknowledged rivalry with Raymond enter into it. He has for the
first time
really thought about being married; he reacts by rejecting both the
company
of women and whatever might be thought feminine in himself: fear,
pity,
conciliation, even passivity, which had been his dominant trait. On the
first
sally he recognizes that Raymond and Masson are old friends who form a
pair from
which he is excluded. His isolation is exacerbated when Raymond
consigns him to
an onlooker's role in the first fight, and still more when he
is obliged to wait
with Marie and Masson's wife while the other two men go to
the doctor. He then
outdoes Raymond both in sullen stubbornness and in
aggressiveness. In the second
trip to the beach Meursault replaces Raymond as
the dominant male. He must make
the third trip to vindicate his honor. One
could argue that Meursault was
suffering from sun-stroke. One could also
mention that he has drunk a good deal
of wine. It is possible to imagine ways
in which Meursault could be defended in
court, such as temporary insanity, or
a plea of self-defence - after all, the
Arab drew his knife first.
Raymond escapes any blame, not only in Meursault's
retelling but also in
court; yet he provoked the quarrel with the Arab and drew
Meursault into
it. The point of this crime, however, is that it has no purpose
and no
excuse. Meursault's originality as a character is precisely that he has
no
interest in telling a story that explains his crime, either to make
it
forgivable or to make it comprehensible.