Why Sartre was stumped by Camus’ “The Outsider”

Albert Camus’ The Outsider (or The Stranger) features on most high school reading lists. Teachers of English literature are attracted to it because of its slimness; it is compact and written in startlingly uncomplicated language; its protagonist – a man alienated from society - is someone teenagers have no trouble relating to.

But is it really that straightforward?

Those of us who teach it year after year – have we really felt the gravity of Camus’ landscape-changing message? The students who skim through it year after year – have they really understood Meursault’s stance as they claim? After all, one of the 20^th-century’s greatest philosophers, Jean-Paul Sartre, was completely floored by the novel when he first encountered it during World War II. (His biographer Annie Cohen-Solal says “his intellectual machinery jammed” [5].) In 1943, Sartre, having mulled over the ambiguity of the novel, published “A Commentary on The Stranger” in the literary magazine Le Cahiers du Sud – with the intention of instructing the public as to how The Outsider should be read.

We are told the absurd (as portrayed by Camus) is not merely “a simple notion”; it is “revealed to us in a bleak light” (77). What Sartre means by this is that the absurd is a human condition where Man faces the truth about himself, realising that the mundane everyday goings-on in his life will not spare him from death and total oblivion. This epiphany immerses him in “hopeless lucidity.” If he is truthful enough to reject the delusions of religion, he will arrive at several basic truths: that the world is chaos, and that there is no tomorrow because death is inevitable. This knowledge will set him apart from the rest. He is now a “stranger” among his own kind. Sartre, however, stresses that the “stranger” is also a “man among men,” that his anguish is also very much ours. His alienation is merely a mirror of our own alienated, disillusioned selves.

What fascinated Sartre about the “stranger” is that he is not to commit suicide. Au contraire. He is to face this meaningless and pointless existence with stoicism, and his liberation can only come from a direct confrontation with death – and living in the moment (this is not the same as the cliché Carpe diem). Since there is no “tomorrow,” the only time that matters to the “stranger” is the present. He exists only to collect experiences; one experience is the same to him as another. Since the world is an absurd place, none of these experiences can be of any significance. This brings the reader to the murky waters of morality and love – the foundation of human society. To the “stranger,” continuity is an impossibility. Morality and love require some kind of continuity or uniformity to manifest, and are therefore perceived as distracting untruths. The word “commitment” is not in Meursault’s vocabulary, and neither is “judgement.” He and Marie are lovers, but there is no desire on his part for a serious commitment. He does not seem disturbed by the behaviour of the abusive Raymond. When he finally kills an Arab on the beach, the reason given is the intense heat of the sun. One reason is as good as another since Meursault’s senses are entirely confined to the present.

How do we judge (for that is what all readers do) a character who is not immoral but amoral, one who does not subscribe to our artificial rules? To do so, we must first learn to forgo judgement and see the character for who he is. We must deconstruct morality as we know it and then start tracing his footsteps down that stretch of beach. Sartre could not get a firm grasp on the novel because its author, indifferent to future scenarios, had long abandoned it. The moment it was conceived (in a moral vacuum), it had been disowned. What remained had to be accepted “in the realm of the absurd” (81).

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism is a Humanism. Yale University, 2007.