How to Make Sense of a Senseless World: Albert Camus’ “The Outsider”

“I tried to make my character represent the only Christ that we deserve.” – Albert Camus speaking of Meursault in 1955

Albert Camus’ brand of existentialism, absurdism, and nihilism with regard to his 1942 “philosophical treatise” The Outsider is a thing of fascination and paradox. In this age of increasing intolerance and orthodoxy, the novel’s ground-breaking theme should once again be highlighted.

Meursault’s antics throughout the novel are the stuff of literary legend: he displays no emotions at his mother’s funeral; he seems oddly unaffected by Marie’s love for him; he shows no concern for domestic violence and animal cruelty; he does not hesitate to kill a man when the need – whatever its cause is – arises. Meursault is the very personification of amorality. He rejects the rules and ethics of society and refuses to be enslaved by what Nietzsche calls “herd morality.”

This naturally brings about grave consequences. In the society we inhabit, a man who does not conform to the established rules is deemed an outcast, an “outsider.” When Meursault shoots and kills an Arab under the influence of the sun’s heat (Man can never overcome the forces of Nature), it is the straw that breaks society’s back, and he is sentenced to death.

Meursault is a prisoner in more than one sense. He is physically imprisoned, by his society’s legislature (he calls it “mechanism”), but his mental imprisonment had begun even before the murder of the Arab. It is this “imprisonment” he is rebelling against; it is his way of telling the world all the things it believes in – order, God, morality, purposefulness – are false and should be dispensed with. He alone has understood the futility of imposing order on a universe that is inherently chaotic and destructive, for all roads lead to death and void.

Order is pointless because the world will fall apart of its own accord (it is its nature). God is impotent because he is a human invention and an ineffectual human attempt to explain away the indifference of the universe towards Man’s fate. Morality is facile because it serves no other purpose than to obstruct and curb the freedom of Man. Purposefulness is a form of delusion as life’s only “purpose” is self-destruction.

Life, seen from Meursault’s perspective, is thus senseless and meaningless. This may sound fatalistic, but in Part II of the book, Camus shows us that the death sentence imposed on Meursault in fact has an unexpected effect on him. Rather than crushing his spirit as one would expect, the prospect of dying makes Meursault realise that the universe is just as indifferent to him as he is to it, and that birth inevitably paves the way for death:

What did other people’s deaths or a mother’s love matter to me, what did his God or the lives people chose or the destinies they selected matter to me, when one and the same destiny was to select me and thousands of millions of other privileged people who, like him, called themselves my brothers. Didn’t he understand? Everyone was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others too would be condemned one day. He too would be condemned… (116)

To be condemned (to die) is thus a privilege (note the passive: Camus does not advocate suicide; he in fact argues against it in The Myth of Sisyphus, championing instead a “conscious revolt” against absurdism), because it is the only exit available to Man, who is forever bound to the “mechanism.” This epiphany, resulted – ironically – from a conversation with the prison chaplain, gives rise to a feeling resembling happiness in him. There is finally acceptance and comprehension. Meursault can now make sense of a largely senseless world; he now knows that life’s only purpose is to extinguish itself and revert to nothingness.

It is a challenging theory that Camus is presenting here, as challenging as it must have been back in 1942, when World War II was in full swing and claiming innumerable lives – for no comprehensible reason.

Camus, Albert. The Outsider. London: Penguin Classics, 2000