sensibilities were clearly marked. For it is poverty that keeps Patrice Meursault from pursuing his education and would have done likewise for young Albert. The testimony of his friends
about never being invited into his home bears witness to an anguished sensitivity, as does his evocative discussion of the novel La Douleur, which had such a profound impact upon him.
Camus’s first effort at a full-length novel, A Happy Death, is quite explicit on the destiny of those condemned to poverty, whatever the natural gifts of their environment. Without money with which to buy the time to be happy, that Mersault would have been condemned to the exhausting rigors and spiritual depletion of the 9-to-5 job, which, however necessary to make ends meet, leads only to a wasted life and meaningless “natural death.”
Who then is this Patrice Meursault who so innocently disconcerts us? A clerk without ambition, who rejects his boss’s offer of advancement and a position in Paris. A man who will marry Marie if she wishes, but who considers marriage no big deal. Obviously intelligent, but having been compelled by poverty to give up schooling, he concluded that ambition was a waste of time and effort. All that mattered was living one day at a time, accepting the pleasures offered, and expecting no more.
Having given up the future, his life follows the trajectory of the moment: job, acquaintances, social routines, climate. Even his language, with its simple factual statements, its lack of connectives, its concentration on sensations and images, bears witness to the pervasiveness of the present. Events happen and Patrice responds. Camus observes: “He limits himself to responding to questions. At first, these are the questions which the world asks us every day —[at the end] they are the chaplain’s questions. Thus, I define my character negatively” (TRN, 1923).
Such is the person we encounter at the outset. It is not clear what effect the death of his mother had on him. Judging by his explicit response, it would seem to have had no effect, other than to mildly annoy his employer and thus cause some discomfort for Patrice. Yet it is here that the narrative begins. The opening lines suggest that Meursault began writing the chronicle shortly after receiving the note from the rest home—perhaps as a diary or a random collection of notes. The exact status of the narrative is not clear or consistent. Pursuing internal clues would lead one to conclude either that he kept a running account of his life from then on, making somewhat regular entries after the day’s or week’s events, or that everything was essentially written from the perspective of a post-sentence reevaluation of his life. Or perhaps it is simply an oral report of his life given at sporadic moments to an impartial observer. In any case, the entries in the first part of the narrative tend to be more direct, more in the style of an immediate, noninterpretative reporting of events in temporal sequence, whereas those of the second part involve greater
editorial selectivity. If we take seriously this change in perspective as the narrative proceeds, we would probably be led to a conclusion emphasizing its temporal elaboration. In any case, the world we see is the world Patrice is conscious of seeing as he sees it. The meaning of these events is, in the first instance, the meaning of these events to him. And it is to that meaning that I now turn.
Meursault’s world
What then is the world that is revealed to us through this stranger’s eyes? One in which events just happen. Of course, a habitual pattern carries us from day to day. But there does not seem to be any logic to the pattern. “Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm” (MS, 12—13). Expressions, movements, modes of dressing and of carrying oneself strike the observer as do colors, lights, sounds, and temperature. Social and natural events merge and interpenetrate, without priority or distinction between them. The social is rather but an aspect of the natural. There is but one unitary present, with the world of habit being altogether natural and inevitable for Meursault.
It is from this perspective that the world is revealed to us in the first part of the narrative. Nothing significant seems to happen. Each event takes place on the same metaphysical plane. If one thing is singled out for attention rather than another, that is only because it momentarily grabbed Patrice’s attention. No hierarchies of value are recognized. Occasional lyrical passages relieve the emotional tedium like shafts of radiant sunlight bursting through the skies of an otherwise overcast day. But that is their only significance. Each of the first five chapters concludes essentially with the observation “that, after all, nothing had changed” (STR, 19).
With the killing of the Arab, however, “it all began.” Meursault understood that with that shot he “had broken the harmony of the day, the marvellous silence of a beach where [he] had been happy” (STR, 50). The natural order is shattered. The cyclical time of a habitual life immersed in nature is transfigured by a single event. All later events now take on the meaning of either leading up to or following from it. If the metaphysical ground of the first part is cyclical nature, that of the second is historicized nature, nature subjected to the organization and interpretation of society. Rather than eternal repetition, events now become the children of the past and the parents of the future, in a linear history that leads either to death or to transfiguration. Each life becomes a unique journey, each event a transition. This metaphysical transformation demands an appropriate existential one. Patrice can no longer act as if his life will be eternal repetition. The unity of nature and
history is sundered, and historically socialized reason emerges to insist on a different kind of accounting.
Under the pressure of events, this realization begins to dawn on Patrice. First, in jail, he is called upon to recount the events at the beach. He is questioned about his past and initially draws a blank, noting that he has lost the habit of self-interrogation. Thinking about his past is the beginning of an experiential transformation by which he comes to locate himself in a linear historical world, which location is the precondition of his being able to take personal responsibility for his life.
With this dawning recollection of his past, a sense of perspective emerges. The flatness of the experiential landscape undergoes seismic transformation. Preferences are recognized and valued. An emerging selectivity stylistically transforms the narrative. Criteria of value are suggested. The sensually given is subject to reflective appraisal, and the previously implicit ethics of quantity begins to acquire an appreciation of experiential qualities that only conscious attention can bring. This qualitative self-appropriation of life comes to consummation in the encounter with the chaplain, when the values by which Meursault had lived are reflectively articulated and defended. Thus completes the reconstruction of his experience. From the reconstitution of his memory to the reaffirmation of his life, Meursault has achieved a reflective grasp of the life he has lived, and has found that it was good. He has also realized that to have so lived was to have rejected the expectations of the established social order. Thus a de facto rebel becomes a de jure one. An explicit articulation of these emerging values confronts a chaplain who embodies the rejected order. But I am jumping ahead of my story.
The world was initially composed of natural and social habits—habits of things and of people. Each had its regularity and its unique sensuous-ness. Patrice observes and responds. He never asks why, what ought to be done, although he does comment upon connections between events—why, for example, the people in the streets on Sunday behave as they do. He thus reveals an ability to analyze facts for their connections, but no interest in exploring purposes or goals. Occasionally he notes the purposes of others— as with Raymond’s desire to get even—but for him, and for us through his eyes, this is but another fact that he observes and to which he responds.
Social conventions also lose their privileged status and appear not to differ from natural occurrences. Like voyagers from another planet, we are often left to wonder at the natives’ strange behavior, their dance of social etiquette and the mirage of their personal beliefs. A feeling of purposelessness tex-tures the narrative, pervading Part 1. A feeling of strangeness is subliminally generated in the reader by the contrast between the pure contingency of the events recounted and our subterranean sense of their familiarity and ordinary meaningfulness, This contrast is brought explicitly to the fore in Part 2 by the
establishment’s insistence on the purposefulness of its world. “The meaning of the book consists precisely in the parallelism of the two parts,” affirmed Camus (TRN, 1924).