The Stranger

Albert Camus

To which I had nothing to say, so I said nothing.

Still that phase lasted a few months only. Afterward, I had prisoner’s thoughts. I waited for the daily walk in the courtyard or a visit from my lawyer. As for the rest of the time, I managed quite well, really. I’ve often thought that had I been compelled to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but gaze up at the patch of sky just overhead, I’d have got used to it by degrees. I’d have learned to watch for the passing birds or drifting clouds, as I had come to watch for my lawyer’s odd neckties, or, in another world, to wait patiently till Sunday for a spell of love-making with Marie. Well, here, anyhow, I wasn’t penned in a hollow tree trunk.

When the bell rang again and I stepped back into the dock, the silence of the courtroom closed in around me, and with the silence came a queer sensation when I noticed that, for the first time, the young journalist kept his eyes averted. I didn’t look in Marie’s direction. In fact, I had no time to look, as the presiding judge had already started pronouncing a rigmarole to the effect that “in the name of the French people” I was to be decapitated in some public place.

Camus is what I imagine Kafka would have been like when he was drunk. Camus has the same heavy unreal feeling of Kafka, but he speckles it with shiny bits of wit, and you wonder if the whole thing isn't him poking fun at you for living a life you imagine so much more real and superior than his characters. There's a good deal of Nabokov in him too. But only if you allow that Nabokov was old enough to be before him.
I wonder how much our moods are influenced by what we read?
I wonder how much what we read is influenced by our moods?
In one case a man may read The Stranger and begin to feel horrible and see the influences of that distance from life and care all around him and begin to think that perhaps he is not so unlike the stranger and perhaps he too is a murderer because the sun is hot.
In another case a man may be struggling with abandonment and feelings of anger and sadness at life and read The Stranger and see in the stranger the feelings he feels, and then with a moment he has misread the book and made it into a mirror image of what is going on inside him.
Perhaps he should keep a log to note dates and times of the moments when feelings occur, that way at least he could prove that he felt a certain way before facing the book. It seems to me though, the big problem is figuring out how to discriminate between the two questions, because no doubt it is in a mix of the two that we live our lives.
The stranger (character, not book) seemed to be a man who didn't care much about anything, that was pushed about a good deal by his life, but also did not ever have reason to care--after all he was only passing through, a stranger. But he did feel things, I think strongly. Yet in the relationships he has and in his trial he is described in such a way as to make you think he doesn't feel much of anything about it. Actually, the more I think of it, the stranger seemed mostly to be bewildered and confused, as if his emotions were a bunch of fish in a tank that is being shaken and stirred up--they never had the time to settle down and let you take a look at them because they were constantly being thrust into situations the muddied the water and moved them away from their proper places and proper faces.
It comes from a special ignorance. Camus puts a casual ignorance into the stranger that comes to a point in key places and you've got to marvel at his mastery. That the stranger could say when his sentence was passed down to him, "some public place" as if, in this situation where every word would seem to be of the most importance, he couldn't be troubled to remember it. But what if that was the language of the judge? What if the stranger is a stranger because the land is strange to him not because he is strange to the land?
Maybe the stranger should have run for it.