Disquietude In The Stranger

Albert Camus creates a paradoxical situation in The Stranger that seamlessly meshes pleasure with disquietude. Meursault’s moral development solidifies his “strangerhood” in society, but that realization solidifies his moral development. However, this epiphanic moment, while transformative to one’s view of the novel, only reveals itself after several other moments of disquietude.

Meursault’s reactions are rarely what the reader envisions as appropriate. People feel disconnected-- disheartened and confused-- when Meursault claims his Maman’s death “doesn’t mean anything” (3). The level of indifference he feels and the actions he performs: making excuses to his boss, having lunch at Celeste’s, going to swim and a movie with Marie, all have the readers questioning Meursault’s character. This displeased feeling continues through the first half of the novel with Meursault’s uncaring and robotic behaviors of watching “families out for a walk… the local boys [going] by… the shopkeepers and the cats” (21-22). One then starts to wonder. One
While readers hope for Meursault to act, when he finally does, it is in a gruesome juxtaposition to the death Meursault would not face to the one he inflicts. In the beginning of the novel when asked if he wants to observe Maman's body, he refuses. But now, as his “eyes [are] blinded behind the curtain of tears and salt… he fired four more times at the motionless body…”(59). Readers hope this act, one of his only acts, might shake him. But once again the indifference and even the selfishness of him “knowing that [he] had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where he’d been happy” (59), causes a sense of uncomfortable regret for Meursault that he is not able to feel himself. It could be said in some way that Camus wanted to make the reader a mirror for what society expected Meursault to feel, but