The Fall (1956) is one of Camus’ most ambiguous texts. The ending leaves readers with more questions than answers. For instance, we are left wondering who the narrator really is and was talking to. What we do know is that Camus wrote the novel as a damning critique of the moral narcissism dominating the French intellectual scene of which he was himself a member. Here, you will get a close reading and reveal which character represents a mirror held up to society by Camus.

Who Is Jean-Baptiste Clamence?

The Fall is written in the first person and set in Amsterdam. The first chapter introduces Jean-Baptiste Clamence. He is a fine talking educated man in his 40s, a former lawyer.

He strikes up a conversation with an unknown interlocutor. We never hear what this person says; instead, we must infer his side of the conversation from Clamence’s responses. We learn that he and Clamence are both French, are the same age, and are from similar middle-class backgrounds. This is interesting in itself as they are drinking in a place where people from their backgrounds would not be expected to drink.

The establishment is what we might call a dive bar. It’s a rough place frequented by pimps and low-lifes. Clamence’s interlocutor is only in Amsterdam for a few days. He will spend most of his time with Clamence, whom he meets by chance, listening to his story. After their first meeting, Clamence pays for the drinks and offers to show his new friend the way back to his hotel. They agreed to meet again the next day.

The First Meeting

When they next meet, Clamence tells his interlocutor all about his old life as a lawyer in Paris. We learn that in his professional and personal life, he would go out of his way to do good deeds. As a lawyer, he represented widows and orphans whenever possible. If any were poor, he would not charge a fee.

But he did not do this simply out of the goodness of his heart. Clamence admits that he loved being thought of (and thinking of himself as) a good person and doer of good deeds. As such, he would always keep an eye out for people in need. His heart would leap for joy if he spotted a blind person who needed help crossing the road or if someone needed a hand with their luggage.

As far as everyone else was concerned, Clamence was an all-around good guy. He thrived on this self-image. But that was in the past. Now, he works giving legal advice to the lowlifes in the Amsterdam dive bar. Enigmatically, he refers to himself as a “judge-penitent.” Both his interlocutor and we, the readers, will have to wait to find out what he means by this.

Adding to the mystery, Clamence mentions a strange experience he had in Paris. Out of nowhere and without being able to locate the source, he repeatedly hears the sound of laughter.

Clamence describes two other key events in his life that profoundly affected his self-image. The first involves a humiliating altercation in a busy street, and the second an unpleasant discovery in his love life. Let us take a closer look at both these events.

Road Rage Humiliation

The first event Clamence recounts to his interlocutor occurred during what we might today call a road-rage incident. An annoying man on a motorcycle breaks down at a set of traffic lights. Clamence, being Clamence, sees this as an opportunity to get out of his car and help.

However, this man doesn’t want any assistance and rudely tells him what he can do with his offer of help. Onlookers gather, and a man leaves the crowd to berate Clamence for supposedly attacking the motorcyclist. Other road users start honking their horns as the newcomer threatens Clamence. In the confusion, the motorcyclist gets his engine working and drives away. Distracted, Clamence is sucker-punched. He walks back to his car amid the honking of horns and meekly drives off. As he passes the man who hit him, Clamence hears himself being called “pathetic.”

What bothers Clamence is being hit and not being able to hit back. This is made worse by the presence of spectators. He daydreams of knocking out the man who punched him and of catching up with the motorcyclist and giving him a sound beating. These fantasies force Clamence to reassess his self-image.

Previously, he imagined how others must see him and thought of himself in the same way. Now he compares how others see him with his revised self-image. He becomes aware of the difference between one’s inner self and motivations, on the one hand, and outward pretense on the other.

Love Life Let Down

Clamence has little difficulty finding romantic partners. But it is not love, as we might imagine it, that he is looking for. While he is not seeking attachment or someone to love, he expects his partners to love him. Until a particular incident, he simply assumes that his current lover thinks him perfect, faultless to the core.

Then one day, he discovers that the lover has revealed his inadequacies to someone. He is stunned. He did not think it possible that she could find any fault with him. Previously, he spent no time worrying about what his lovers thought of him. In response, he devotes himself entirely to winning their hearts. Then he proceeds to abuse them. His idea is to become so awful to them that they should want nothing more to do with him, but be so in love with him that they are blind to his faults and awful behavior. When he succeeds, he moves on to the next woman.

This event, however, causes Clamence to reevaluate himself. He is not concerned with any moral repercussions of his behavior. Rather, he is forced to realize through his actions that (a) people can see fault in him and (b) he cares about what people think. Here we see again the conflict between Clamence’s inner self and how others see him. And, in addition, the conflict between his motivations for acting and his self-image.

Clamence next tells his interlocutor about a third event that had a huge impact on his life and would become a catalyst for his new life in Amsterdam.

The Woman on the Bridge

One night, as he walks home after spending the evening with a lover, Clamence crosses the Pont Royal bridge in Paris when he notices the young woman. She has her back to him, staring into the Seine. The next thing he hears is a splash and then a scream. He chooses not to look. For the next few days, he makes a point of not reading the newspapers.

This cowardice is completely contrary to his self-image and that which he projects to others. Everyone, including himself, would have expected him to dive into the river and attempt to save the suicidal woman. But, he did not. Worse, he kept his head down and pretended that nothing was happening.

Before Clamence reveals these incidents from his past, he tells his interlocutor that he has started to feel ill and asks if he minds going for a walk. Afterward, he asks to be helped home. Before parting company, they arranged to meet at 11 am the next day in the bar. From there, they will visit the island of Marken and see the Zuider Zee, during which Clamence will continue his story.

The Second Meeting

Clamence picks up from where he left off and tells his new friend about his relationships with old friends. Due to his newfound awareness of his inner self, he now sees the falseness and pretense that were fueling these friendships. He even contemplates suicide to test his friendships, only to realize that this would only provide those who know him a chance to playact their emotions, just like he had done.

He comes to the lucid realization that everyone is always judging everyone else.

In his newfound lucidity, Clamence believes he has discovered a disturbing truth about human existence. Happiness is only forgiven if shared, but to find happiness, one should not be concerned with others. There seems to be no way out of the paradox.

More realizations come to him. For example, he realizes that everyone wants to believe they are unique because there is something special about them that is unearned. People want to be praised for things they acquire by chance or forgiven for things that were not under their control. In other words, it is simply because of who they were destined to be at birth that has the most significant impact on their lives. This relates to the absurd and the yearning for meaning in a meaningless universe.

The Absurd

Forced to examine his life, Clamence realizes he had never taken anything very seriously before. Life, for him, was treated like a game which he played to the best of his ability. Here we can see that Clamence is both similar and very different from one of Camus’ previous characters, Meursault from The Stranger.

For Camus, we experience the absurd when we are exposed to a clash between the seriousness with which we necessarily have to treat life and the realization that life is meaningless. Life is meaningless not in the sense that we cannot live meaningful lives, but because it does not come with a built-in meaning.

During the conversation, Clamence hints at something he has at home that the police are looking for. What this is will be revealed on the final day.

Continuing his account, Clamence talks about how he wanted people to look at him and see on the outside what he sees on the inside. So he starts acting in a way to change people’s opinions of him. On one occasion, he asks a restaurant manager to get rid of a beggar whose presence is putting him off his lobster. Contrary to expectations, he composes treatises in favor of the death sentence. He even considers spitting in the faces of blind people, realizing then how much he resented them all along. However, the opinions of him remain unchanged. People are too busy thinking about themselves to pay close attention to others.

Clamence tells his interlocutor, as they prepare to board the boat home from the island, that he wants to explain what he means by a “judge-penitent” but first must talk about the “little ease.”

Evening and the “Little Ease”

Clamence begins by telling his new friend about how, exhausted by trying to change people’s opinions of him, he threw himself into romances with women. He met one woman whose idea of love came from all the romance magazines she would avidly read. But the relationship did not last. She tried to starve herself to death before running off with a man who more closely resembled those she’d read about in magazines.

Having failed at romantic love, Clamence tried debauchery and embarked on a life of hard drinking and womanizing. This too failed when his body could not cope with all the abuse he subjected it to.

What he was looking for were distractions from the reality of life as he sees it. But, as he discovered, the human condition is inescapable. For him, life is marred by a perpetual sense of guilt, but he does not know what he is guilty of. To illustrate this idea, he describes a medieval punishment known as the “little ease.”

Essentially, this was a prison cell in which prisoners could be kept in a constant state of discomfort. The ceiling was too low for anyone inside to stand up fully, and the walls were too close together for them to stretch out their legs when lying down. According to Clamence, the agonizing cramp of not being able to fully extend their limbs eventually makes the person inside the “little ease” feel their guilt. The idea of innocence, for them, becomes only the joy of being able to fully stretch out.

Clamence’s point is that human beings are made to feel guilt simply by life itself and the human condition. We can never metaphorically “stretch out our limbs” and experience full freedom. So far, the best we can do is try to run away from our lack of freedom.

This is what Clamence did when he lived a life oblivious to others, when he attempted to lose himself in a romance, and again in his short-lived life of debauchery. However, he says he has now found a solution. He asks the interlocutor to visit him at home the next day.

Visit at Clamence’s Home

Clamence is in bed when the interlocutor arrives. One of the first things he tells his new friend is that a lot of what he has said over the past few days is not strictly speaking true. But, he asks, does it really matter if the facts are accurate if the story reveals something true anyway?

We will discover in this final chapter that Jean-Baptiste Clamence is not even his real name. He admits that his intention is not simply to pass the time with someone and tell his story, but to have a plan in mind that he has kept hidden until now.

We also find out that his interlocutor is himself a Parisian lawyer. This is significant because Clamence says he tailors his story to fit his audience and seeks to become a mirror to whomever he is speaking to. If the idea is that the interlocutor sees himself in Clamence’s story, a mirror image in fact, then it may well be that Clamence’s claim to have once been a Parisian lawyer may be entirely fictional. This revelation ought to put us, readers, on our guard.

In a densely packed final chapter, Camus crams in three key ideas: Clamence as a failed “pope”; the theft of the Van Eyck painting, “The Just Judges”; and the idea of being a “judge-penitent.” Let us take a look at each of these in turn.

Popes, Just Judges, and Judge-Penitents

He tells a story from his past (or makes one up) about his experiences in a prison camp in North Africa during the war. One of his fellow prisoners, disillusioned with the Catholic Church due to its support for Italian fascism, decides they need a new pope.

Clamence is elected and takes the role seriously. One day, terribly thirsty in the hot desert prison, he drinks water he was supposed to give to a dying man. He rationalizes his act and forgives himself. In doing so, he rises above the depth to which he has sunk. The lesson Clamence learns from this is that we should forgive popes, but only because that will make us feel superior to them.

The painting mentioned in The Fall is a real-life painting that was stolen from a Cathedral in Ghent. Clamence shows the painting to his interlocutor and explains that after it was stolen, it ended up at the bar where they first met. Traded for a drink, it used to hang on the wall until Clamence told the owner what he actually had on display. He was allowed to take it home for safekeeping. The interlocutor is given various reasons why Clamence enjoys keeping the painting. One of the more interesting reasons is that he relishes the idea that a copy of the painting is on display at the Cathedral in place of the stolen original. This means that visitors are admiring false judges, which he thinks is a good metaphor for life.

Finally, Clamence reveals what a “judge-penitent being” is. Put simply, it is the act of decrying oneself for all one’s mistakes and misdeeds, but doing so in such a way as to hold up a mirror to society; to show one’s audience they too are guilty of the same things. At this point, the penitent becomes the judge. Clamence has tailored his story exactly so that his interlocutor will see himself in what he has heard. He will then voluntarily return to Clamence in order to be judged.

Clamence is a perfectly crafted portrayal of the kind of moral narcissism that leads people to denounce themselves and everyone else for supposedly unforgivable sins, but at the same time, placing themselves above others as authority figures on the subject.

Camus’ target included people like Jean-Paul Sartre and other middle-class intellectuals who turned a blind eye to workers suffering in Soviet prison camps, whilst decrying in the name of the workers the very system that privileges them over working men and women.

Clamence wants to shed his guilt over being born into an easy existence and to alleviate his dismay at the apparent inauthenticity of everyone around him. However, he does so by attempting to start a movement in which everyone in the world is made to feel exactly like he does and think exactly like he does. This was Camus’ indictment of the narcissism that blighted the intellectual scene. We are left with two questions: was he correct, and if so, is this still the case today?

Deconstruction, the brainchild of Jacques Derrida, is one of the most controversial and misunderstood ideas in philosophy and literary criticism. At first glance, it seems to reject traditional meanings—but in reality, it’s a subtle method for uncovering hidden layers of meaning and contradiction in texts.

Deconstruction & the Umbrella of Logocentrism

Deconstruction, as fathered by Jacques Derrida, is a method of interpreting texts that aims to show language is absolutely indeterminate, without limits, an infinite playground of meaning.

In one of his most popular works, Structure, Sign, and Play, Derrida characterizes the history of Western metaphysics as “logocentric.” What he meant by this term is that, throughout history, metaphysics has presupposed a “logos” (meaning “reason” or “word”) that serves as the center of all existing things.

Various theories proposed what the center was, but all posited a “presence” of some sort. In some theories, only one uniting “presence” is found in all things, as in Berkeleyan idealism. Other times, each individual thing was said to have its own “presence,” similar to Aristotle’s metaphysics.

When applied to theories of meaning in language, logocentrism refers to any theory that claims that the relationship between a word and the thing it refers to has a central presence that gives that relationship a definitive meaning.

To illustrate further, logocentric theories would say that some grounding presence makes the word “umbrella” and an actual physical umbrella true. For Plato, this might be the Form of Umbrellahood. For contemporary analytic philosophers, this might be analogous to a function in mathematics that takes inputs and generates outputs such as “true,” “false,” or “null.” And, for some theories, it was still said to all center on God!

Structuralism: The Antithesis to Deconstruction

Structuralism is one such theory of meaning guilty of logocentrism, a theory Derrida wrote about extensively. Here is his explanation of structuralism:

“Structure—or rather the structurality of structure—although it has always been at work, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or of referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin” (278).

In structuralist theories of language, the “fixed origin”—what Derrida sometimes calls the “transcendental signified”—was thought to be the source of determinate meaning. The word “umbrella” has a fixed, determined meaning: it refers to an actual umbrella. According to structuralism, there is a structure among the word, the object, and the truth that confers meaning in language. Hence, the name!

However, at some point in history, it was realized that this center, or “fixed origin,” was in a continuous chain, with one center replacing another. When one center was shown to be incorrect, another would be introduced. When that new center was no longer shiny and exciting, the cracks would begin to show, and another center would become trendy.

This cycle prompted the beginning of “thinking there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a present-being” (280). In other words, those who had taken notice of the cycle began thinking that instead of a central presence, there was only an absence.

Deconstruction as Play

Deconstruction is the whole-hearted embracing of this absence and infinite meaning, what Derrida described as the “joyous affirmation of the play of the world… the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin.” In other words, to deconstruct is a form of “play”!

When applied to texts, deconstruction makes this indeterminacy of meaning explicit through this “play.” A text traditionally interpreted as expressing “this” can be interpreted as saying “not this” simultaneously. This is more than just rejecting one interpretation in favor of another. It is finding both the meaning of the words and the contradiction of those words in one container!

Différance and the Deferral of Meaning

To explain how this “play” of meaning occurs, Jacques Derrida introduced one of his most famous ideas: différance. According to Derrida, a word does not contain its meaning as philosophers once believed. Rather, meaning is constantly deferred through a network of differences between words. In other words, a word’s meaning is constituted by what Derrida called its différance—the way its significance emerges only through what makes it different from other words.

For example, the word “umbrella” is constituted by an infinite chain of its differences from words like “sprinkler” or “microwave.” To go even further, the concept of “not a duck” or “bipedal” could be found in the word “umbrella” if one were to follow the right threads. We never actually get to the meaning of “umbrella,” but we would have an exhaustive list of everything it is not. This is the “deferral” of meaning that Derrida was interested in.

So, according to Derrida, the meaning of a word is in an infinite chain of deferral to its differences. The excitement starts when this chain eventually redoubles back onto its antonym. Thus, deconstructive interpretation is a method of showing that all texts contain contradictory meanings within themselves through the “play” of différance. For example, the word “full” contains both the concept of “at capacity” and “empty” once deconstructed — antonyms and a contradiction.

This process of pulling apart the pieces, following the links of the chain to the inherent contradiction within, is what it means to use deconstruction. The process is a form of play; instead of mourning the loss of meaning, we can rejoice in finally being liberated from the confines of certainty and rigidity!

An Example of Deconstructing a Literary Text

To understand deconstruction more fully, seeing an example of its application in action can be helpful. For brevity, I have chosen a short poem—Design by Robert Frost—and will attempt to show how to apply deconstruction as a method.

The widely accepted interpretation of this poem is a twist on the teleological argument for the existence of a designer God. So, a deconstructed interpretation will show that the poem also contains an opposite conclusion.

The First Stanza: Spider, Moth, and Heal-All

The poem consists of two stanzas. In the first, the narrator describes a strange scene he has come across:

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,

On a white heal-all, holding up a moth

Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—

Assorted characters of death and blight

Mixed ready to begin the morning right,

Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth—

A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,

And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

The scene starts innocuously enough. I have also encountered well-fed, white spiders and was not shaken by the experience. The black ones with red markings on the rear are the ones to be concerned about, right?

Wrong! This particular spider is perched on a white heal-all, clutching a white moth corpse. The heal-all is a flower, one that is supposed to be blue. However, this heal-all is menacingly white. This is why our narrator is feeling disturbed by the scene – three all-white ingredients have come together so improbably yet perfectly so that the spider could ensnare and feast on the moth.

Frost calls these three things “ingredients of a witches’ broth” because it seems they have been chosen intentionally for an evil final product of witchcraft.

The Second Stanza and Traditional Interpretation

This leads us to the second stanza of the poem. Our narrator, disturbed by this scene he has witnessed, starts rattling off a series of questions that it caused him to have:

What had that flower to do with being white,

The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?

What brought the kindred spider to that height,

Then steered the white moth thither in the night?

What but design of darkness to appall?–

If design govern in a thing so small.

What caused this naturally blue flower to be unnaturally white? Further, what caused this white spider and white flower to come together so perfectly? Finally, what—or who—is to blame for guiding the poor, white moth towards the other two and, effectively, its death?

Frost gives us an answer to these questions in the final two lines of this stanza. If this small yet horrific scene was ordered by design, this implies a designer. Or, if these three white things are indeed like ingredients to a “witches’ broth,” there must be a master chef who has orchestrated the recipe. The horrifying twist is that if there is a designer—or master chef—in this dark scene, then it could only be malevolent.

In other words, this sonnet is a teleological argument for the existence of an evil sort of God. Only a malevolent God would have designed such a configuration between the white spider and the mutant flower and then intentionally steered the unlucky moth straight to them. In any case, the universe is not a friendly place. We are at the mercy of the malevolent master chef.

The Word “Blight” and the White/Not-White Contradiction

If there is only a single thing that we can glean as a definite interpretation of this sonnet, it is that all three of these characters of death are white. Frost tells us that the spider, moth, and heal-all are white, both individually and collectively.

However, we are also told that the spider, moth, and heal-all are “assorted characters of death and blight.”

Let’s hone in on the word “blight” a little more. Specifically, the word refers to a type of plant disease caused by a fungus or mildew. Plants can find themselves with blight. Another usage of blight is for areas of cities that have become rundown and neglected. Cities can find themselves with blight. In both cases, it is a destructive condition that ceases the healthy growth of a thing.

Here is where we can discuss why the word “blight” is so interesting in this text. Its etymology traces it to the Old Norse word blikna, meaning “to pale.”

Our white ingredients are infected with “blight,” a word that retains a trace of this Old Norse meaning, so our white characters are paling or becoming white.

But wait, if the spider, moth, and heal-all are in the process of becoming white, then we can infer that they are not completely white. Rather, they have color and are in the process of losing it.

Collapsing the Teleological Argument

Even though we are told five separate times about the whiteness of our ingredients, we are also told they are not white at all! The spider, moth, and heal-all are both white and not white, as shown by the words “white” and “blight.” The inference from a design to a designer rested on the near-impossible configuration of the white spider, moth, and flower. Without those three things, there is no inference to be made for a designed universe nor a designer God.

Revisiting the scenario with our newly deconstructed “blight” in mind, the teleological argument for a God is no longer plausibly generated. In conclusion, deconstruction posits that the poem simultaneously offers a teleological argument for God and does not offer one.

In 1095, Al-Ghazālī stood at the summit of his intellectual fame. As head of the prestigious Niẓāmiyya Madrasa in Baghdad, he held one of the most powerful academic positions in the Medieval Middle East. He enjoyed the trust of Seljuk authorities in Isfahan, the favor of the Abbasid Caliphate, and the admiration of students, jurists, scholars, and political leaders. He had also completed his philosophical masterpiece, Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (“The Incoherence of the Philosophers”), and Maqāṣid al-Falāsifa (“The Aims of the Philosophers”). 

By all appearances, he possessed everything one could desire. Yet, he knew no peace. This brilliant mind realized that his studies held no true worth and contributed nothing to his salvation, driven as they were by a hollow desire for reputation and honor. He renounced his property and, freeing himself from the shackles of worldly desire, quietly left Baghdad to spend the next decade as a wandering Sufi ascetic.

Inside the Golden Cage of Baghdad’s Academic Prestige

In 1091, Niẓām al-Mulk, founder of the Niẓāmiyya schools and vizier to the Seljuk sultans, appointed Imam al-Ghazālī (1058–1111 CE) to lead the Baghdad madrasa. The appointment brought him respect and wealth, and his lectures attracted hundreds of students. The Niẓāmiyya in Baghdad, inaugurated in 1067 CE, was one of the first medieval institutions to function like a modern university. It awarded certificates and featured specialized faculty, lecture halls, a renowned library, alongside funding to cover student expenses. The Seljuk state subsidized the establishment of these schools in the 11th century, dedicating them to the study of Islamic law (Shari‘a), theology, grammar, and various sciences. 

Despite Al-Ghazālī’s standing as a distinguished intellectual, he felt the tyrannical burden of unruly desires weighing upon his soul, along with the torment of worldly, ego-driven thoughts from which he sought liberation. As he explains in Al-Munqidh min al-Ḍalāl (“Deliverance from Error”), his spiritual autobiography, he recognized the falseness underlying his motives and felt as though he was standing on the brink of a deep abyss. He intensely feared that unless he undertook a radical spiritual transformation, his fate would be eternal fire. 

The Day the Great Philosopher Lost His Voice

For six months, Al-Ghazālī wrestled with an inner conflict. One day he would resolve to leave everything behind, only to hesitate the next, held back by the ties of his official position. His soul cried out to him that all his knowledge was nothing but illusion and fantasy. He described how the Tempter sought to weaken his resolve, whispering that his crisis was temporary and that if he left his noble post, he would regret it and never recover. 

Overwhelmed by anguish, he found himself unable to speak. God, he says, put a lock on his tongue. He lost his appetite, could not swallow food or water, and grew increasingly frail. It was July 1095. Physicians concluded that the illness originated in his heart and spread through his body, and that a cure would not come unless his grief was lifted. 

Interestingly, this was the result of him reaching a breaking point, where he finally entrusted his fate to God. From this perspective, his voice was no longer his own. It now belonged to God.

Stripping the Robes of Ego

Through God’s aid, Al-Ghazālī finally resolved to leave public life in late 1095. Yet, the withdrawal was no simple matter, as it provoked the displeasure of political authorities and the censure of the imams in Iraq, while some even speculated that his decision was driven by fear of the government. 

Believing he could be detained, he devised a clever ruse by announcing his intention to make a pilgrimage to Mecca while secretly planning to go to Syria, believing this would conceal his true intentions from the Caliph and his circle until he was safely settled there. He never expected to return. 

A Decade in Disguise and Devotion

Before departing, he dismantled his wealth and made arrangements to support his family. The scholar dedicated himself to solitary prayer, contemplation, and Sufi devotions for two years in Damascus. He then moved to Jerusalem, where he spent his days in retreat, daily seeking sanctuary in the Dome of the Rock. Thereafter, he performed the Hajj pilgrimage and visited Mecca, Medina, and the Shrine of Hebron. 

He lived in this manner for a decade, seeking certainty and conviction higher than that which reason could provide and which could only be granted through special graces. Tradition says he took up the humble duties of sweeping the marble floors of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, under an assumed identity to crush his own ego. 

How the Thinker’s Return Changed Islamic History Forever

These experiences enabled him to transition from the study of philosophy to the spiritual, experiential practices of Sufism—a path that seeks to achieve a state of union with God, wherein Truth is perceived through insight and intuition rather than through reason. 

So empowered, he authored his magnum opus, Ihya’ ‘Ulum al-Din (“The Revival of the Religious Sciences”), where he harmonized Islamic doctrine with Sufism. To this day, the book remains one of the most widely studied and analyzed texts among Islamic scholars.

Duty drew him back to Nishapur and to teaching in 1106. His decision to walk away from power altered the course of Islamic thought forever, while also anticipating the skepticism introduced by Western philosophers centuries later.

Have you ever thought that our universe is the battleground for light and darkness, truth and lies, good and evil? Actually, it is what Zoroastrian dualism teaches. Developed by the followers of Zoroaster, it is one of the world’s oldest faiths, born in Persia. Most of the world’s religions teach that bad things happen in life. But Zoroastrianism goes a step further. While “good” religions say there is an almighty good force, Zoroastrianism talks about an equally sized cosmic bad force, too.

Zoroaster and the Birth of a Dualist Philosophy

As we know it from ancient texts, Zoroastrianism was founded by Zarathustra, also known as Zoroaster, who lived from about 1200 to 1000 BC in Persia. This “religion” proposed a radical idea. Actually, he believed that our world is a cosmic battlefield between two forces. One force is Ahura Mazda (the Wise Lord). It stands for light, order, and truth. The other is Angra Mainyu (the Destructive Spirit), standing for chaos, lies, and darkness.

But Zoroaster was not only a religious leader. He was also a deep thinker. What he did was introduce dualism. It is the belief that reality has two parts that are “in fight” with one another. For Zoroaster, these two parts were asha (truth, order, harmony) and druj (lies, chaos, disorder). Central to Zoroaster’s teachings is the view that life is a matter of moral choice. He believed that every thought, word, or deed either supports good or evil.

Let’s compare this “religion” with monotheistic faiths like Judaism or Christianity. They see evil as a flaw in God’s otherwise perfect creation: something that occurred when angels or humans chose to disobey, or because they were tempted. But Zoroastrianism points in a different direction. It teaches that badness is itself a living cosmic power: real, powerful, and locked in an eternal struggle with good.

Plato and St. Augustine were among those who thought more deeply about this topic. They were asking who created evil if there was an almighty God, who was good? Zoroaster had a different answer. He said that evil has its own existence. And humanity must confront this adversary by, among other things, aligning itself with what is true.

The Nature of Cosmic Dualism: Two Opposing Principles

As was already mentioned, cosmic dualism in Zoroastrianism asserts that two opposing cosmic powers shape the universe. One of these forces is Ahura Mazda, who embodies light, truth, order, and life and is therefore known as the Wise Lord. The other force is Angra Mainyu, also known as the Destructive Spirit. It represents darkness, chaos, lies, and death.

These powerful forces are continuously battling each other. This battle occurs not only in the heavens but also on Earth, where every human action takes place. This isn’t the same as the struggle between good and evil that we see in films. Zoroastrianism offers a way of understanding reality itself. According to this philosophy, existence is an ongoing struggle between forces that bring things together in harmony and forces that tear them apart: cosmic forces. Kindness and cruelty form part of this conflict, and everything else we experience, too.

Other “faiths” share these concepts. For example, Manichaeism was established in the 3rd century and divided the universe into forces of light and dark, the human spirit becoming confined within matter.

During the early centuries AD, Gnosticism held sway among many Christians. They too preached that our world had been created by a bungling or malevolent entity quite separate from the real (and hidden) God. Yet there are other parallels. If you look at belief systems that say similar things, one stands out. Among all religions, there is an ongoing cosmic tug-of-war between the forces of good and evil. Zoroastrianism can be considered almost unique in having such an optimistic view about how this struggle will end.

Moral Dualism and the Human Role in the Conflict

In Zoroastrianism, we do not just watch good and bad things happen. We are part of the story. We have free will (the ability to choose), so we are responsible for what we do. Truth or lies, good or bad, order or chaos: every day we must pick sides. We can’t avoid it. Zoroaster said that with everything we choose, we are either helping Ahura Mazda (light) or Angra Mainyu (darkness). At the center of Zoroastrian ethics is an uncomplicated idea that really works: Good thoughts, good words, good deeds. These aren’t just things that make you sound moral. Saying these things might also help you in your everyday battle against evil.

This idea of moral responsibility is found in many areas of philosophy. Immanuel Kant thought that because we can choose to do things out of a sense of duty and after thinking them through, this makes us moral people. Jean-Paul Sartre agreed. He believed that we always have a choice and that our actions (or lack of them) show the world what sort of person we are.

A similar view can be found in Zoroastrianism, which tells its followers that they are not weak but soldiers in a cosmic battle between light and dark. So here again, everyday actions take on huge importance. If the world were made up only of physical events like earthquakes or solar eclipses, that would be one thing. But it is not. Human beings also shape what happens.

Time, History, and the Final Victory of Good

In Zoroastrian belief, there is a positive side to dualism. It does not go on forever. Eventually, good is going to win, not just for now but for all time.

This faith puts forward the idea that things happen for a reason, because there is a plan. History is going somewhere. It is a story with an ending rather than a plotless loop. And the ending? Well, it’s absolutely brilliant: the world is made anew, perfect and pure. All the wickedness is destroyed. There will also be a final savior showdown to root for, when a figure known as the Saoshyant appears. This vision provides Zoroastrians with profound meaning and hope. Even if the world becomes dark, there is always the promise of light.

Contrast this with systems like Manichaeism or Gnosticism, where light and darkness are seen as eternally opposed and stuck in a never-ending struggle. Zoroaster had a different vision: it’s more akin to a mythic hero’s journey than a grim stalemate. Hegel thought history had a goal: freedom. But Zoroastrian thinking anticipated him. Zoroaster believed the world was evolving towards a day when good would do more than hold its own against evil; there would be no contest.

Influence on Later Religious and Philosophical Thought

Although Zoroastrianism is ancient, its influence continues in many of the world’s main religions. They were deeply affected by their belief in a cosmic struggle between good and evil. The concept of a singular, personified cosmic adversary, which heavily influenced later Abrahamic views of Satan and demons, finds its earliest structural roots in Zoroastrianism. Such ideas were not found in early Jewish beliefs until Jews came into contact with Persian culture due to the Babylonian exile.

Greek thought was also influenced. For example, Plato said that human souls want to leave Earthly life (which he called the Cave) for the perfect world of Forms. This idea of longing for truth over illusion is very Zoroastrian. Western philosophy took up many other things, too, such as the soul’s journey, responsibility for right and wrong, and truth beyond everyday reality.

The tension between good and bad still underpins how we understand things, a perspective shown not just in stories but also in politics and movies. But Zoroastrian tales do not just entertain us. They have also formed our ideas about how decisions might shape what lies ahead—an inheritance worth pondering.

Why Zoroastrian Dualism Still Matters Today

An idea originating in the ancient faith of Zoroastrianism continues to offer insight into life today. Dualism suggests everything has two sides: truth and lies; order and chaos.

The implications of this belief for daily moral decision-making are profound, an activity that adherents think has both personal and cosmic importance. Human beings can change the world (they have to accept they might make it worse as well as better). It is also possible to view Zoroastrian dualism in a different way, as a metaphor. We all face internal battles between hope and fear, honesty and selfishness.

When we look around, we can see society at work: compassion fighting corruption, peace battling violence. These are daily struggles that ancient Zoroastrian texts say are part of an ongoing cosmic battle between good and evil. If we recognize this, it may give our lives meaning, and we can choose which side to be on.

Despite the ongoing environmental crisis, individuals continue to uphold principles of Zoroastrianism. They believe that by imposing order on disorder, it is possible to look after our planet, show consideration for living things, and prevent rapacious powers from damaging objects needlessly. This is not only a faith urging action on such fronts, but also a moral code. In a world turned upside down, dualism provides an elegant escape route: instead of being impotent, there is scope for making a difference, which makes sense when everything is taken into account. One can choose truth over lies, have a clear purpose in life, and help the cosmos become what it should be.

In the UK, Camus’s novel L’Étranger is published under the title The Outsider. In the US, it is published as The Stranger. In this article, I first address the pros and cons of each rendering and how the use of each title has influenced the reception of Camus’s text. I then move on to the major translations available in English and discuss the substantial differences among the texts when they are read side-by-side. Finally, I offer my opinion on which translation could be considered the “best.”

How Translations Can Be Different

Consider the difference between Stuart Gilbert’s and Sandra Smith’s translations when Meursault is in prison. He talks to a guard about how difficult it is without access to women. In Gilbert’s translation, we read the following: “The jailer nodded. ‘Yes, you’re different, you can use your brains. The others can’t. Still, those fellows find a way out; they do it by themselves.’ With which remark the jailer left my cell. Next day I did like the others.”

We see what the jailer and Meursault are alluding to and what he ends up doing. However, this is absent in Smith’s version, which translates the scene as follows: “‘That’s right; at least you understand how things are. The others don’t. But they all end up finding ways to relieve their frustrations.’ Then the guard left.”

For commentators looking to see how intelligent and sympathetic to the human condition Meursault is, these different translations of the original text will make a big difference.

Does the Title Matter?

So far, we have only seen a few slight differences among the English translations of Camus’s novel. One might still ask if it really makes a significant difference and how someone could claim one translation is better than another if it is only a matter of a few different words here and there. To answer this question, we could begin with the title of the novel, which in French is L’Étranger.

In the UK, Camus’s novel is published under the title The Outsider, whereas in the US it is published under the title The Stranger. Which is better? It all depends on your understanding of the central character and narrator, Meursault.

The French title L’Étranger can mean: the stranger, the outsider, or the foreigner. It is up to the translator to decide which is the best English rendering of the title. How do they go about doing this? The answer is that they look into Camus’s wider work and into the novel itself and decide for themselves which translation to go with. In other words, the translator will decide which is the most appropriate English word based on their reading of Camus and his philosophy.

Matthew Ward, whose translation is best known to US readers, went with The Stranger, but Stuart Gilbert and Sandra Smith chose The Outsider. Is Meursault best captured by the idea of a stranger or an outsider?

Ultimately, there is no correct answer to this. Meursault is certainly odd. Anyone who reads the novel can see this, but both a stranger and an outsider would be odd. The difficulty in seeing him as an outsider is that he is so well-liked and respected by everyone he meets in the novel. If he were truly an outsider, then why would people seek his advice, consider him a “man of the world,” or offer him a prestigious promotion at work? However, the same question applies to him being, in some way, a stranger. That is, how is Meursault some kind of stranger when he is so well integrated into his society?

It might be tempting to say that Meursault is not an outsider because he is well integrated into his community by the time of the murder, halfway through the novel. However, isn’t it his reaction after the murder that shows Meursault to be an outsider within his community? The very fact that he does not do everything he can to get himself the most lenient sentence (express great remorse and beg forgiveness) shows that his way of thinking is outside the norm.

The Influence of the Translator

For a long while, the only English translation of L’Étranger available was Stuart Gilbert’s. In the UK, this was supplanted by Joseph Laredo’s. Readers owning two copies of The Outsider, one by Gilbert and the other by Laredo, could tell by looking at the spines which was which. Already a short novel, 100 pages or so, Gilbert’s would be around 20 percent thicker than Laredo’s. The latter seems to emulate Camus’s spare style in a different language. The question is whether their different translations affect English readers’ understanding of Camus’s novel.

There are always little differences that can change a close reader’s view and understanding of a character. For example, let us compare Laredo with Smith and other translators. From the first lines of the novel, we read:

Laredo: “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.”

Smith: “My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.”

Gilbert: “Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday: I can’t be sure.”

Ward: “Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.”

We can see from these slightly different translations a world of different meanings. Laredo’s is the most spare. Here, Meursault seems the least affected by his mother’s death. Smith adds the possessive pronoun “my,” which suggests more feeling between Meursault and his mother. Gilbert, however, diverts focus onto the telegram Meursault has received from the nursing home after his mother’s death. Ward chooses to give Meursault’s mother a more informal, affectionate name. In his translation, “maman” suggests a far closer and more affectionate relationship than “mother” as is used in the other translations. Someone close-reading an English version of Camus’s novel must be affected by these differences that appear slight yet are significantly different in meaning.

Why Do Translators Make Such Different Choices?

But why would one person go with a particular translation over another? The answer is that translators, like the rest of us, use the scholarly literature in order to understand a text. That is, to understand, say, Meursault and translate what he has to say from French into English, translators often read the secondary literature to better understand the character.

For example, Ward tells us in his translator’s preface that he opted for “Maman died today,” for the iconic first lines of Camus’s novel because Sartre goes out of his way, in his explication of The Stranger, to point out Meursault’s “childish” use of the word “maman.” Thinking, then, of a close-reading scholar reading Ward’s translation, we can see that this scholar will be heavily influenced by a Sartrean reading of L’Étranger simply because the translator was heavily influenced by Sartre.

Consider this scene from Gilbert’s translation. Meursault is in prison and observing the other prisoners during visiting time. He sees a young male prisoner visiting with his mother and says: “His eyes, I noticed, were fixed on the little old woman opposite him, and she returned his gaze with a sort of hungry passion.” Ward translates this scene as: “I noticed he was across from the little old lady and that they were staring intently at each other.” Smith also goes with “staring at each other intently.” There is a big difference between a mother and son staring at each other intently and with “a sort of hungry passion.” Where does Gilbert get this from?

In the original French, Camus writes that they both look at each other with intensity (“et que tous les deux se regardaient avec intensité“). This is somewhat charged for a mother and son, but still a way off from staring at each other with “hungry passion” as Gilbert has it. It seems that he has incorporated his reading of Camus’s complex mother/son relationship from elsewhere into his translation of the novel. Gilbert also ramps up the passion when Meursault first meets Marie. Camus, Ward, and Smith all say that Meursault rests his head on Marie’s stomach; Gilbert says it is on her lap.

Obviously, for Gilbert, Meursault is a far more sensuous and worldly-wise character than that depicted by Ward and Smith. But consider this: is Meursault not described by other characters in the novel as a “man of the world,” that is, worldly-wise? Perhaps Gilbert captures the real Meursault better when he puts his head in Marie’s lap rather than on her stomach. Indeed, Ward also suggests something more erotic than Camus when he says that Meursault feels Marie’s heartbeat on the back of his neck.

So, Which Translation Should You Read?

To answer the question of which is the best translation of Camus’s L’Étranger, one must say whose interpretation of the novel is the best. As we have seen, all translators attempt to capture what they believe to be the best interpretation of the novel. This they do by not only reading the actual source material but also Camus’s other works and the scholarly literature. How well a translator does will ultimately depend on your own reading of Camus’s text and your opinion of Meursault and Camus’s overall project. However, this does not mean that no recommendations can be given.

For UK readers, Sandra Smith’s translation is very close to Camus’s original and contains none of Gilbert’s extra flourishes. She also avoids the trap that Laredo perhaps falls into, in that she manages to reproduce Camus’s spare language without having to cut actual sections of the text.

Matthew Ward’s interpretation is older than Smith’s but is, in my opinion, every bit as good as hers. For readers wishing to contribute to Camus Studies in English, Ward’s text remains the international standard.

Of course, Camus’s original French text is the best version of L’Étranger to study; however, for those wishing to read and study his most important novel in English, either Smith’s or Ward’s translations will do fine.

The Misunderstanding is an inverted take on the parable of the prodigal son. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus tells a parable involving a young man who leaves home rich and is greeted with joy on his return home poor. In The Misunderstanding, Jan returns home rich and is murdered by family members who fail to recognize him. Albert Camus’s play was met with a mixed response when first performed. Many failed to understand the nuances of the story. Luckily for you, we got you this article.

Overview of the Play

The Misunderstanding is a play in three acts with five characters. There is Jan and his wife, Maria, a couple in their thirties. Martha and her mother are both owners of the hotel where Jan and Maria spend the night. Finally, there is the Old Servant, a mysterious and mostly silent man in his seventies.

Jan and his wife, on one side, and Martha and her mother, on the other, are both keeping secrets. Neither Jan nor Maria knows that the two hoteliers have a sideline in murdering guests and stealing their money. What Martha and her mother do not know is that Jan is, in fact, Martha’s long-lost brother. What’s more, he is returning home having made his fortune, which he intends to share with his family.

The driving force behind the murders is Martha. She is desperate to escape the hotel she feels trapped in. It is situated in a dreary, landlocked area of Europe, and she yearns to escape to somewhere warm to relax and enjoy life by the sea.

This is, in fact, what her brother managed to do. Jan is returning with his wife from North Africa, where he moved to after leaving home years previously. Martha certainly has had a deprived life, living alone with her mother, save for the occasional business traveler stopping by to spend the night at the hotel. During the play, she reveals that despite being thirty, she has never even kissed a man.

Her mother is tired of life, getting towards the end of hers. She half-heartedly goes along with Martha’s murderous activities but never really believes they will ever escape the hotel and move southwards to sunnier climes. Her reluctance to help Martha comes not from any moral concerns, she is too apathetic to care about morality, but from the strain on her back caused by helping to carry the bodies.

On the face of it, everything seems to have turned out nicely, so where do things go wrong?

Jan’s Plan

Jan has been away from home for twenty years. When he left, Martha was only eight years old. It would be unrealistic to expect her to recognize him. But Jan thinks his mother might. They were both adults when he left home, and (he hopes) a mother should recognize her son. When he checks into the hotel, he does so under a false name in order to test his mother. Jan needs to know she recognizes him.

Maria understands why her husband would want to reconnect with his family. But she cannot understand why he did not simply write to them and say he was coming. He says that if he treats them as strangers, he will discover the real them and what they need to be happy. Once he has discovered this, the mask will come off, and the family will be reunited properly. From there, he can use his money to genuinely help them.

Jan pretends he is motivated by a sense of duty towards his mother and sister, but his real intentions are clear. We discover, however, that Jan’s mother never recognizes him. In addition, her apathy and fatigue have left her unable to love anyone. This includes her own daughter, Martha.

In the first act, Jan unwittingly does almost everything he can to make it easier for the murderous hoteliers to dispose of him. As well as not revealing his true identity, he checks in alone, telling his wife that he is scared she will give the game away.

Martha now believes her guest is traveling alone. He also tells her that he has no family, which makes Martha think he will not be missed. Jan reveals that he is independently wealthy, and money is no problem for him. Martha now knows that he has lots of money. In the second act, he fills Martha’s head with talk about his life in sunny North Africa, inadvertently reminding her of her plan and why she commits murder.

Without realizing it, Jan sets himself up as the perfect victim for Martha’s particular modus operandi.

Let us now take a closer look at the crime itself.

Murderous Martha

As murderers, Martha and her mother are ruthlessly efficient. They first select the right kind of victim. The victims usually have no friends and family who will miss them when they disappear. Such an existence might seem poor, a lonely life perhaps. They attempt to justify their actions by claiming they are doing these men a kindness by painlessly removing them from life. As well as this justification being pretty feeble, it seems unlikely that Martha or her mother really needs a moral justification for murder.

For practical reasons, the guests doomed to be murdered are put in rooms closest to the front door. This is simply to avoid having to carry their bodies down the stairs. In a chilling bit of foreshadowing, when Jan offers to help his mother out of her chair, she waves him off, saying she’s not an invalid, and her hands tell him, “They could lift a man up by the legs.”

There are two stages to the actual murders. First, the victims are given a drink laced with sedatives. Once they are in a deep sleep, Martha and her mother carry them down to the dam and throw them, still asleep, into the water to drown. In another piece of twisted logic, Martha claims that it is not they who murder their guests because the guests are still very much alive when they leave their hands.

One final practical point is that Martha and her mother usually murder their guests on their first night at the hotel. They do not want to give their victims a chance to meet people in the village and tell them where they are staying. The first act of the play ends with Martha reluctantly agreeing to delay Jan’s murder for one night because her mother is too tired.

Jan’s Murder

Martha comes to Jan’s room with fresh towels. The two engage in conversation in which Jan waxes lyrical about his new home in North Africa. Jan is, of course, oblivious that he is helping Martha make up her mind to kill him. After she leaves, he realizes that he will never get through to her or his mother, and the recognition he was hoping for will never happen.

Alone in his room, all he can think about is his wife and how this hotel, despite being where he grew up, will never be a home to him. Feeling anxious and sensing he is calling out for something or someone who will never answer his call, Jan impulsively rings the bell in his room. Moments later, the Old Servant knocks on his door, and Jan says he rang the bell just to see if it worked. The old man leaves in silence.

Shortly afterward, Martha arrives with a cup of tea. It contains the sedative. She has decided to go ahead with murder after all. To explain why she is bringing a drink Jan did not order, Martha says that the servant is old and often gets confused. Jan accepts the tea and drinks it when he is alone.

His mother then comes to the room to see if he has drunk the tea. She has discovered that Martha has broken her word and administered the drug despite agreeing to give their guest one night’s reprieve. When she finds out the tea has already been drunk, she says nothing. Jan regretfully informs her that he made a mistake coming to the hotel and will be leaving after dinner. Before he falls unconscious, he tells himself that he will return tomorrow with Maria and reveal his true identity.

Martha, her mother, and the Old Servant come into the room and prepare to take Jan to his watery grave. The mother tells her daughter that their guest was planning to leave. Martha replies that this changes nothing because she has already made up her mind to kill him. They reflect once again on how their victims are better off because they die peaceful deaths and how the present victim is, in a way, lucky. Martha does not seem to notice when her mother says she envies Jan’s eternal sleep.

The Truth Comes Out

The final act opens the morning after the murder. The mother is exhausted from the effort of disposing of the body, but Martha’s mood is upbeat. She feels reborn and ready to live a new life in a faraway land. At this point, the Old Servant arrives and hands Martha a passport, which she reads impassively. It belonged to Jan and had fallen out of his pocket.

Martha, who has recognized the name inside, tells her mother who they have murdered. The mother merely sighs with resignation and tells her daughter she knew that one day something like this would happen. With indifference, she tells Martha that she has reached the end of her life and will now commit suicide. Martha is distraught at the revelation.

The mother explains that knowing she failed to recognize her own son and then murdered him has ignited some spark of feeling within her. Over time, after years of habitual apathy and indifference, she became completely dead inside. But now how can she carry on living knowing she killed her son? She is determined to join him in his grave.

Martha feels no remorse for killing her brother, albeit without knowing who he was. She has no feelings for him whatsoever because he abandoned the family years ago. Jan lived his life and experienced all the world had to offer, whereas she was trapped in the hotel.

Without deliberate cruelty, but nevertheless torturous for Martha to hear, the mother explains that her daughter’s love is not enough to keep on living. That even though Jan left them and never made contact until now, a mother’s love for her son is much stronger than that for her daughter.

Devastated, Martha does not resist as her mother pushes past her to go off and take her own life.

Maria Comes Looking for Her Husband

Martha, alone after her mother’s final departure, has her own realization. She knows now that her mother does not love her. She hates Jan, but more than this, she hates the world and the life she was condemned to. Despite now having the money to move abroad, there is nowhere on earth she wants to live. Martha resolves to commit suicide.

At this point, Maria enters the hotel looking for Jan. She is anxious and worried. Martha, who at first takes her for a guest seeking a room, coldly turns her away. When Maria says she is looking for Jan, Martha tells her he is not at the hotel. Maria persists, saying he must be, and Martha continues to deny it, telling Maria he left in the night. Finally, Martha tries to get rid of Maria by telling her that her husband’s whereabouts have nothing to do with her. At this, Maria reveals Jan’s secret and tells Martha the man she is talking about is actually her long-lost brother. To Maria’s shock, Martha not only says she already knows but also that Jan is dead.

Maria cannot believe what she is hearing and thinks Martha is joking. But Martha proceeds to calmly and coldly explain how she and her mother murdered Jan. She also tells Maria about how they have been committing similar crimes for years. When Maria tries in horror to get Martha to see what she has done, she only succeeds in making her angry, not repentant.

Before she leaves to commit suicide, Martha has one last thing that she wants to do: make Maria realize that the world is a cruel, indifferent place in which nobody really has a home.

Maria is left broken and bewildered, distraught in her loss and grief. After Martha goes, Maria calls out in despair for someone to reassure her that Martha’s words are not true. Crying out to God to have mercy on her, she is interrupted by the Old Servant. She begs him to help her and, in the final line of the play, he says, “No!”

Remorselessly Bleak or a Message of Hope?

The Misunderstanding received mixed reviews when first performed in 1944. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, Camus wanted the play to be in the style of an ancient Greek tragedy. As with other plays, he chose to have his characters speak in a highly stylized literary manner.

He also uses specific phrasing in the actors’ speech to draw out the dramatic irony and themes of misunderstanding and talking at cross-purposes. This technique was lost on many theater-goers, however, who found it hard to accept characters who were supposed to be sheltered, country folk, but who spoke highly formal French rarely encountered outside classical literature.

People were also unprepared for the existential and absurdist themes within Camus’s play. Several decades later, audiences are more familiar with these ideas and prepared to encounter them on stage. However, Camus believed it contained a message of hope. To understand what this could be, we need to consider Camus’s broader project.

The play is part of a cycle of works devoted to Camus’s exploration of the absurd and the search for meaning in a meaningless universe. Its companion pieces are the novel The Stranger, the essay The Myth of Sisyphus, and another play, Caligula.

In all these works, Camus is attempting to understand how we know, for sure, that some things in life are meaningful. After all, if we live in a meaningless universe, then the only things that can be meaningful are those we give meaning to. But there is a problem. If we simply choose to say something is meaningful, how can we truly believe it to be so? In his absurd works, Camus is interested in awareness gained from revelatory experiences.

In the play, Martha’s mother is apathetic and completely indifferent to life. After realizing she has killed her son, she suddenly realizes there is something meaningful and valuable in life: a mother’s love. This is not something she chooses to believe. Far from it. The realization is devastating, and she ends up taking her own life as a result. Not because she would rather live in a world without love, but because she has discovered there is love in the world and cannot live with the knowledge she desecrated it.

During a trip to Tuscany, Camus saw a fresco of the Resurrection of Christ painted by the Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca. This piece is considered one of the most important artworks surviving today. While Camus is not a Christian, he saw in this fresco a truth about humanity that he could build a philosophy on. When we look at della Francesca’s The Resurrection of Jesus Christ, we too can look upon the face that Camus took to be the fierce grandeur that underlies the human resolve to live.

The Resurrection of Jesus Christ

The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is a fresco painted by Piero della Francesca. In the 1460s, he was commissioned by the local authorities of his hometown of Borgo Santo Sepolcro, in Tuscany, to produce an artwork for the town hall. The fresco survives, although it was nearly destroyed during the Second World War. Albert Camus saw it during a visit to Italy and was greatly taken by the work. Towards the end of his essay ‘The Desert,’ he writes:

As he emerges from the tomb, the risen Christ of Piero della Francesca has no human expression on his face – only a fierce and soulless grandeur that I cannot help taking for a resolve to live. For the wise man, like the idiot, expresses little. The reversion delights me.

Camus is certainly not alone in his admiration for the fresco. Della Francesca’s Resurrection is often included near the top of lists of the greatest artworks in the world. Indeed, when the work was saved from destruction during the war, it was due to the refusal of British artillery officer, Anthony Clarke, to shell the town. Clarke had read an influential essay on the fresco and was moved to defy orders to preserve the work.

It was the face of Christ that particularly moved Camus. But it is worth mentioning in passing an unusual feature of the fresco: it has two vanishing points. One is Jesus’s face, but the other is the center of the sarcophagus. It means that when viewing the artwork, the eye is drawn up and down without a fixed point of focus. This would have particularly appealed to Camus, who was fascinated by doubleness and opposing viewpoints.

We have mentioned Camus’s essay ‘The Desert,’ in which he writes about della Francesca’s Resurrection. Let us now take a brief overview of these essays.

Camus’s Early Essays

Camus published two collections of essays while still living and working in Algeria. The first, published in 1937 as L’Envers et l’endroit, is known in English as The Wrong Side and the Right Side (note the doubleness, mentioned above). Camus scholars cherish these essays not only for their primitive and youthful freshness but because so much of Camus’ early influences are laid bare in these texts. He too cherished these works, commenting toward the end of his career that these essays contain the source of his entire philosophy.

Worthy as these essays are, his second collection, published in 1938 under the title Noces (Nuptials in English), is generally seen by Camus scholars as superior. Each of the four essays sheds light on important themes widely considered central to Camus’ philosophy.

Indeed, the title alone, Nuptials, captures an idea deeply imbued with meaning. Camus is interested in the mythopoeic idea of a ‘wedding’ between God and humankind that is central to both Christianity and Judaism. Although not widely recognized, these early essays by Camus can be read as theological works.

Camus was an atheist, or more accurately an agnostic, but he was very familiar with, and even fascinated by, Christian theology. One only needs to see the titles of his works to see the Biblical connection: The First Man, The Rebel, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, The Plague. A great deal of his work overlaps with that of Christian thinkers, but from a non-Christian perspective.

Religions at their core attempt to answer two closely related questions. The first concerns why we exist, and the second why our existence is important. In short, religions seek the meaning of life.

Indifference

A major recurring theme in Camus’s philosophy concerns the idea of indifference. It is therefore interesting that he chose to greet the readers of Nuptials with a quotation from the French author Stendhal. Taken from his 1838 novella, The Duchess of Paliano, the quote reads as follows:

The hangman strangled Cardinal Carrafa (sic) with a silken rope that broke: two further attempts were necessary. The Cardinal looked at the hangman without deigning to utter a word.

Stendhal’s work concerns real people from 16th-century Europe. Camus is interested in one in particular, Carlo Carafa, and especially his death. The real-life Carafa had an interesting life and career. Born in 1517, he began as a mercenary, then joined a Catholic military order and was elevated to cardinal by his uncle Pope Paul IV in 1555. Charged with multiple crimes, he was executed by strangulation in 1561.

But we need not know anything about the actual Carafa or indeed much at all about Stendhal’s depiction of the man. All we need to trouble ourselves with is the quotation Camus takes from the novella. What is of interest is the manner in which Carafa faces death: with indifference.

We can see from the quote that Carrafa is sentenced to death by strangulation via a silken rope. Historians tell us that the real-life cardinal was indeed executed by strangulation in March 1561. The detail given in the quote is that it took three attempts to strangle the man. Horrific as this experience must have been, the detail that captured Camus’ imagination was Carrafa’s attitude and demeanor: he says nothing.

There is pride in Carrafa’s indifference.

The Myth of Sisyphus

Camus makes several references to indifference in his 1942 essay on the absurd, The Myth of Sisyphus. This essay is one of the most important philosophical texts on absurdity and the meaning of life. Before tackling indifference, let us take a brief look at absurdity.

The concept of the absurd is complicated, but it can be understood in simple terms as the unpleasant experience of finding oneself bereft of meaning while at the same time feeling strongly that one’s actions and beliefs are meaningful.

Consider the closely related religious questions mentioned above concerning why we exist and why our existence is important. We stated that these two questions concern the meaning of life (or its absence). The absurd is experienced when someone finds themselves at a loss to explain why human beings exist and why it is important that we do, while at the same time feeling utterly convinced that human life is meaningful.

Note that the absurd is not a problem for religious people or nihilists. Those with faith in God believe we exist because it is God’s will that we do. They also believe our existence is important because it is important to God. The absurd does not arise because there is no contradiction between these views and the belief that life is meaningful. Nihilists who believe we exist by chance and that our existence is unimportant do not also hold the contradictory belief that life is meaningful. Therefore, they too have no problem with absurdity.

We might think that if Camus praises indifference, he must be advocating for some kind of nihilism. After all, nihilists appear to be indifferent to life. But he is not. It is important to note that Camus holds that life is meaningful. There can be no absurd if it is not.

Is a Life Without Meaning Preferable?

There is an infamous passage in The Myth of Sisyphus that causes confusion among scholars. At one point, Camus seems to suggest that a meaningless existence is better than one with meaning. In other words, we are better off if our lives are meaningless. Let us look at the passage.

It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear on the contrary that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning.

On the face of it, it does seem like Camus is suggesting that lives lived without meaning are preferable. However, this interpretation does not fit with the conclusion of the essay. Famously, Camus uses the myth of Sisyphus, a man condemned by the gods to endlessly roll a rock up a mountain only to have it roll back down again just before reaching the summit, to argue that we must ‘imagine Sisyphus happy.’

Sisyphus is happy, according to Camus, not because his life is meaningless but rather the opposite. Yes, he is condemned to perform a pointless task that will be eternally frustrated, but that is not Camus’ focus. He is interested in Sisyphus’ descent down the mountain to retrieve his rock. This time is Sisyphus’ own, and he is free to find meaning for himself. The point is that Sisyphus is happy because he can find meaning in an otherwise pointless existence.

When Camus says that life will be lived better if it has no meaning, he means that life is better if it comes with no pre-existing meaning. This is because if life does not come with a built-in meaning or purpose, we have the opportunity to find our own.

So where does indifference fit in?

The Wine of the Absurd and the Bread of Indifference

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus talks about a state of mind in which a person becomes fully aware of the absurd. He says: “At last man will again find there the wine of the absurd and the bread of indifference on which he feeds his greatness.” In the same essay, he also talks about “the profound nobility that is found in indifference.” “Everything,” he says, “begins with a lucid indifference.”

We can note the obvious religious overtones. When Camus speaks of bread and wine, he is clearly referring to the Christian Eucharist. Jesus told his disciples that every time they broke bread and drank wine they should think of him [Luke 22: 19-21].

Breaking bread is a daily practice; if future disciples of Christ take his message seriously, they will keep him and his teachings in mind daily. For Camus, it is imperative that we keep the absurd in mind. For Christians, Jesus is the way and the truth and the life [John 14:6]. Camus, who was not a Christian, believed that the absurd was the truth. For him, it was imperative that we keep the truth of the absurd in mind every day.

In fact, for Camus, the absurd, the idea that we cannot help believing that life is meaningful, put against the inability to explain why this is the case, is the only solid, concrete truth we human beings have. He believed that our awareness of this, coupled with our determination to live and thrive, made us, as a species, great.

The visual expression of this human greatness, for Camus, is expressed in Piero della Francesca’s The Resurrection of Jesus Christ. In the painting, he sees in Jesus’s face a steely resolve to live. We can see, quite clearly, that Christ’s face in the artwork is almost emotionless. There is a kind of magnificent indifference to his resurrection.

Camus was inspired by this fresco before fully articulating his philosophy of the absurd. It is not his philosophy in pictorial form, but we can perhaps get closer to Camus’s understanding of the world through appreciation of this artwork.

Search online for Albert Camus, and you will inevitably find numerous memes in which the idea is expressed that Camus believed life to be meaningless. Indeed, Camus did not believe life comes with a purpose, but he also believed it is impossible to live a meaningless existence. In his philosophy, we must find meaning in our lives for life to be possible. To better understand Camus on this topic, we must make a distinction between “meaning” as in comprehension and “meaning” as in significance or meaningfulness.

A Life Lived Without Meaning?

There is a key passage in The Myth of Sisyphus that has led to much unnecessary confusion amongst scholars in the secondary literature. Not reading carefully, and possibly too heavily under the sway of a few very influential commentators, they have misread this passage as Camus suggesting that a meaningless life is better than a meaningful life. Before discussing why this interpretation simply cannot be accurate, let us look at the passage in question.

Found within the “Absurd Freedom” section of the essay, Camus writes that the idea of life comes with a meaning already built into it, so to speak. According to many of the world’s religions, the world is not devoid of meaning but only appears so. Let us look briefly at this idea.

For Christians, life also comes with meaning. God created the universe and everything within it for a purpose. His purpose may be a mystery, and many Christians consider it their duty to discover and fulfill God’s purpose. Nevertheless, whether we know what the meaning of life is or not, there is still a meaning to be found according to this religious belief. In other words, life comes with a meaning (and you have to find it).

Camus is not a Christian, and therefore, he does not believe that life has meaning. How, then, does he believe this allows life to be lived all the better? The answer is that because life does not come with a meaning, we are free to create and discover meaning for ourselves. And this, for Camus, is what makes life valuable. Note that by talking about value, we are now thinking of life as important, significant, or meaningful. Before we move on to this idea, let us first take a quick look at Camus’s influences.

Inspired by Nietzsche, Camus on Living a Meaningful Life

Friedrich Nietzsche greatly inspired Albert Camus. Indeed, we would not be going very far wrong at all if we were to read The Myth of Sisyphus as a response to a challenge set by Nietzsche in his writings. At the end of the first, longest, and most philosophical section of his essay, Camus states directly that Nietzsche shows us the way. While his relationship with Nietzsche is too complex to explore here, two texts by Camus’s mentor and spiritual interlocutor provide useful context for the present discussion.

Nietzsche wrote mainly in aphorisms, short observations not usually more than a few paragraphs, intended to draw out a particular idea for further reflection. We are interested in two of his aphorisms here. The first comes from his 1882 book, The Gay Science, and the second from Beyond Good and Evil, published in 1886. In both, Nietzsche expresses a peculiar view about Christianity.

Nietzsche’s aphorisms are numbered and often given titles as well. In Nietzsche scholarship, we typically refer to them with the initials of the book from which they are taken and their number. Some very famous aphorisms are also known by their title or even their main subject.

The first one we will be looking at is GS 125, also known as “The Madman” and Nietzsche’s “God is dead” aphorism. Here we will see an idea that is also central to Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus.

Nietzsche contends that while many people consider themselves atheists, very few understand the consequences of atheism. In brief, if God does not exist, then every value and belief that has been previously justified needs to be re-examined and new justifications found if these beliefs and values are to remain meaningful.

We have seen that Camus does not believe in God and that life has no meaning. Consequently, since he knows that we cannot live without meaning, once meaning has been lost we must replace it with a new belief. As we shall see dramatically played out by Nietzsche in GS 125, this is no light undertaking.

God Is Dead, and We Have Killed Him

GS 125 opens with a madman running around the marketplace with a lantern, claiming to be looking for God. The atheists observing him mock the man and jokingly shout out suggestions as to where God might have gone. Finally, the madman cries out that God is dead and that “we have killed him.” What Nietzsche means by this is not that God has literally been killed but that people have ceased to believe God exists. This is why he makes a point of saying that the people in the marketplace are atheists. What the madman says next holds the most interest for us in this present discussion.

In the aphorism, Nietzsche contrasts the reaction of the “madman” to the death of God with that of the marketplace atheists. While he is distraught, lost, and entirely disoriented, the atheists are at ease and even joking around. At first, the “madman” is shocked by their reaction, but soon the penny drops: they do not believe in God, but they do not yet know what this means.

What they fail to realize is that without God, all beliefs and values that were previously justified by appeals to the existence of God are no longer justified.

In GS 125, Nietzsche is making the point that life does not come with a meaning already built into it and, therefore, the necessity of creating meaning for ourselves. The “madman” acknowledges this when he asks the crowd: “What festivals of atonement, what holy games will we have to invent for ourselves?” Here he is talking about the creation of a new set of myths to replace the ones lost when we “killed God.” For Camus, this requirement to create meaning for ourselves is part of what makes life worth living.

New Horizons

The horizon is often used as a metaphor for the limits of a person’s experience and understanding; we often advise people with sheltered or too restrictive outlooks that they ought to “widen their horizons.” The German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, in his magnum opus Truth and Method, has this to say about the horizon, which expresses neatly what we are discussing here:

“The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point. Applying this to the thinking mind, we can speak of narrowness of vision, of the possible expansion of the horizon, of the opening up of new horizons, and so forth […] A person who has a horizon knows the significance of everything within this horizon, whether it is near, far, great or small.” (Gadamer, 313)

The significance of something relates to its importance. When considering whether a thing is significant or not, we ask ourselves what it signifies or, in other words, means. But how do we know if something is important, significant, or meaningful? We can determine that something is a useful means to an end, but this only puts off the question. Now we have to ask ourselves why this end, to which this thing is a means, is itself important and so on. In asking these questions, we can notice a difference between meaning and significance.

Simply comprehending the meaning of something does not make it meaningful. Imagine seeing a photograph of a poster written in a strange language and having it translated for you, only to discover it says something like “no parking between 8 am and 5pm.” You now know the meaning, but it is not something that you would ordinarily refer to as meaningful.

A key problem that Camus addresses in The Myth of Sisyphus is how to make something significant or meaningful. But how can we invent a meaning for life and really believe that what we have invented is important and significant? Here is where Nietzsche’s second aphorism comes into the story.

Nietzsche Shows the Way

I said previously that in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus credits Nietzsche with showing him the way. What he says in full is:

“Nietzsche writes: ‘It clearly seems that the chief thing in heaven and on earth is to obey at length and in a single direction: in the long run there results something for which it is worth the trouble of living on this earth as, for example, virtue, art, music, the dance, reason, the mind – something that transfigures, something delicate, mad or divine,’ he elucidates the rule of a really distinguished code of ethics. But he also points the way of the absurd man.”

Camus is quoting from aphorism 188 of Beyond Good and Evil. “The absurd,” for him, is the unpleasant experience of finding yourself bereft of meaning in a given situation. However, it is not simply that you cannot comprehend what you are experiencing, but that the old meanings have somehow fallen away, leaving you painfully aware of their absence. The experience of the “death of God” is the absurd writ large.

When Camus talks about Nietzsche pointing the way of the absurd man, he means what someone who takes the idea of the absurd seriously should do next. And we can clearly see from BGE 188 that, for Nietzsche, the next step is to find something that makes life worth living; in other words, something that makes life meaningful.

The rest of The Myth of Sisyphus is Camus’s exploration of whether this can actually be achieved. He concludes with his version of the Sisyphus myth and tells us in the very last sentence that “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” If we imagine Sisyphus happy, we must surely imagine his life as meaningful.

One of the most important questions Camus asks in his essay is whether it is possible to create myths that make us feel that things in life and the world are significant, valuable, and meaningful. Often, we simply feel like we know (perhaps without knowing why or how we know) that certain things are meaningful, but how can we be sure we are not kidding ourselves? The atheists in Nietzsche’s GS 125 thought they knew, but they were simply relying on Christian justifications without realizing it. The problem is this: if we make up stories intended to show how life is meaningful, how can we trust them, given that we just made them up?

Camus on Meaning and Meaningfulness in Life and the World

We have seen that in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus is interested in two kinds of meaning: meaning as comprehension and meaning as significance. Since he does not believe in God, he does not believe that life comes with a built-in meaning. For Camus, however, this is a good thing, and life will be lived all the better because of the opportunity to create our own meaning and make our lives meaningful.

Taking his lead from Nietzsche, Camus sets himself the goal of finding something to live for that makes life worth living. For life to be worth living, it must be meaningful. However, a problem he encounters is how one can invent a reason why something is valuable and really believe it is true, knowing it is an invention.

Camus believed he solved the problem. It is beyond the scope of this article to explore Camus’s solution here; however, one thing should now be clear: Camus believed that life is meaningful and The Myth of Sisyphus is his case for the value of life. For a greater understanding of Camus’s solution, his companion pieces to the essay are a great place to start. These are the novel The Stranger and the plays Caligula and The Misunderstanding.

A popular view of Meursault is that he is cold, indifferent, and incapable of reflection and emotion. The problem with this view is that the actual text of Camus’ novel The Stranger provides very little support for it. Indeed, there is much to suggest that this view is wildly inaccurate. Here, we test the most extreme characterizations of Meursault from the scholarly literature against the source material.

Getting Acquainted With The Stranger

Albert Camus’ The Stranger (1942) is written in two parts. In part one, the hero, Meursault, goes to his mother’s funeral and, after returning home, has dinner with a neighbor, Raymond. Raymond is aggrieved over the actions of his mistress, an Arab woman, and is seeking revenge. Meursault agrees to help by writing a deceitful letter on Raymond’s behalf.

Days later, Meursault and his new girlfriend, Marie, accompany Raymond on a day out at the beach. Two Arabs, one of whom is the brother of Raymond’s now former mistress, follow them. There are several altercations, including one in which Raymond is slashed in the face. Meursault later encounters the Arab knifeman and ends up shooting him dead.

The second half of the novel concerns Meursault’s arrest and trial. The prosecutor argues that Raymond was a pimp and his ‘mistress’ was one of his prostitutes. He also claims that Meursault is an underworld enforcer who killed the Arab to send the message that Raymond is not a man to be trifled with. None of this is true.

We will focus solely on the first half of The Stranger. Here, Meursault is shown living his day-to-day life among friends, colleagues, and strangers. We want to know how he sees himself and, in terms of this investigation, how he is seen by others.

In much of the scholarly literature on The Stranger, Meursault is characterized as intellectually and emotionally stunted. At the extreme end of this view, we see the idea that he is incapable of thought and reflection, leaving him socially inept. This is the view we will be challenging.

It is important to note that we are not interested here in passing judgments on Meursault’s actions or moral character. We are concerned solely with assessing his intellectual and emotional capabilities.

Does Meursault Lack Intellectual and Emotional Understanding?

Philosopher Robert Solomon, in his text Dark Feelings, Grim Thoughts: Experience and Reflection in Camus and Sartre (2006), argues that Meursault is barely capable of thought or feeling.

Solomon’s account, however, is not without its problems. The biggest problem for Solomon is that The Stranger is written in the first person. That is, the text is Meursault’s own account of events. There is no way a person incapable of thought or social understanding could be narrating this text.

A second problem is that everyone who knows him takes Meursault to be an educated ‘man of the world’. Furthermore, he comes across as immensely likable. How can a man with no social understanding or emotional intelligence be viewed so favorably by his peers?

In fact, a great deal of the text must be ignored if we are to get anywhere close to accepting Solomon’s account of Meursault. Let us first look at how Meursault is received by the other characters in the text, and then at the complication (for Solomon) of his serving as the narrator of the story.

Meursault: Barely Capable of Thought or an Educated “Man of the World”?

In the first half of the novel, we see that Meursault is not only well-liked by those around him but also well respected and considered intelligent. People come to Meursault when they need advice. At work, his boss singles him out for a promotion and a coveted position in Paris. Even if we ignore the fact that Meursault is seen as a suitable candidate for promotion, the fact that he manages to hold down a white-collar clerical job is something those like Solomon, who want to say he is incapable of thought, cannot satisfactorily explain.

Let us now look at the incident that sets everything in motion: Meursault’s decision to write a letter on behalf of Raymond. If Meursault is incapable of thought and socially and emotionally inept, why would Raymond ask him to write a letter on his behalf? Raymond explicitly says he wants Meursault to help him because he knows Meursault is capable of doing a good job. Everyone seems to know that Meursault is an educated man.

Just how educated is Meursault? We know he went to university and did some undergraduate studies. He says that he had to give up his studies to look after his mother. “When I was a student, I was very ambitious about having a career. But when I had to give up my studies, I realized quite soon that none of that kind of thing mattered very much.” This passage presents major problems for those like Solomon who want to claim that (a) Meursault is incapable of ambition and (b) that he is incapable of reflection.

Meursault as Narrator

The Stranger is narrated by Meursault, which is a major problem for those who claim he is incapable of thought and reflection. His account of events is too well expressed to have been written by the kind of intellectually and emotionally limited human being commentators like Solomon take him to be.

Solomon’s rather desperate solution is to suggest there are two Meursaults: Meursault the narrator and Meursault the narrated. That is, there is an intellectual Meursault telling the story of another Meursault that does not think, never reflects, and “rarely even speaks.” But where is this second Meursault? Not in the text, that is for sure. As we shall see, Meursault thinks, talks, and reflects a great deal.

It is true that Meursault undergoes a profound change in his worldview at the end of the novel. But his intellectual powers and emotional understanding are unaffected. He has the same level of cognitive ability from the first page of the novel to the last. Solomon, who wants to make a philosophical point using Meursault as an example, simply ignores the character found in the text.

Solomon is far from alone in talking about a Meursault not found in the novel. For example, in his On Camus (2002), Richard Kamber, to make a point about existential indifference, claims that Meursault put his mother in a home and immediately forgot about her. However, the text states that Meursault traveled for hours to visit her every Sunday for two years. However, we will pay more attention to David Sherman’s view.

Meursault and Reflection in The Stranger

David Sherman, in Camus (2008), ignores every explanation Meursault offers for his actions to fit his Sartrean interpretation of the novel. Sartrean bad faith involves self-deception regarding our freedom to choose. Sherman argues that Meursault deliberately refuses to reflect upon his actions and choices to such an extent that he is a profound example of bad faith.

In fact, Meursault often engages in reflection; indeed, probably more so than the average person. For example, when Meursault agrees to write Raymond’s letter, he reflects on his free choice to do so. He does not try to convince himself that he must do so because Raymond is a friend.

The problem here is that Sherman ignores anything in the text that shows Meursault engaging in reflection. As we shall see, in order to make his claims of Meursault living in Sartrean bad faith, Sherman must rewrite the story of The Stranger to fit his own narrative. Consider the following chapter by the end of the first book.

Three Altercations on the Beach Resulting in Murder

By the end of the first part of the book, Raymond invites Meursault and Marie to join him one Sunday at a beach chalet owned by his friend Masson and his wife. Meursault is warned that the brother of Raymond’s mistress has been stalking him and is out for revenge.

Meursault, Raymond, and his friend Masson go for a walk on the beach and encounter two Arabs. One of whom is the man stalking Raymond. There is a fight. The Arabs lose, and Raymond starts showing off to Meursault. At this point, the brother of his mistress draws a knife and slashes Raymond’s face. Masson and Raymond go off to find a doctor, leaving Meursault to explain everything to Masson’s wife and Marie, who are both distraught. We can call this “altercation one.”

When Raymond returns, he is seething with rage and storms out onto the beach. Meursault correctly guesses that his friend is looking for the Arab and is planning something stupid. He follows Raymond, and when they come across the Arab, Raymond produces a gun.

Meursault, knowing that telling Raymond not to shoot will only provoke him into shooting, cleverly persuades him to hand over the gun. He says that he will fire if the Arab tries anything dirty. Raymond insults the man who, wisely (considering Meursault has a gun trained upon him), says nothing. This is “altercation two.”

Raymond, now appeased, is in good spirits. He and Meursault go back to the chalet, but at the steps to the entrance, Meursault hesitates. He does not want to deal with the distraught women again. So he heads back out onto the beach. Here, he bumps into the Arab, who draws his knife. Meursault fires the gun and kills him. This is “altercation three.”

Where Sherman’s Account Goes Wrong

For a man supposedly bereft of intellectual and emotional intelligence, Meursault’s handling of Raymond is remarkable. He knows that any attempt to tell Raymond not to shoot will only make him more determined. So Meursault asks for the gun and tells him he will shoot. On the spot, he devises a face-saving scheme in which Raymond can hand over the gun and still get revenge.

Although Raymond is now happy, Meursault is not. He does not want to go back to the chalet and “deal with the women again.” There is no point just standing on the steps of the chalet, so Meursault walks back out on the beach where he will have altercation three. So far, his behavior seems perfectly reasonable. However, Sherman sees things differently.

In Camus (2008), Sherman omits altercation two from his account of The Stranger. The way he tells it, Meursault goes back to the chalet after the altercation one, stops, and heads back out alone. If we ignore altercation two, then there are no distraught women, and Meursault does not disarm Raymond. Instead, Meursault, who in this version of events must be carrying his own gun, heads back out onto the beach rather than going into the chalet.

Sherman’s claim is that Meursault secretly wants to kill the Arab but will not admit this even to himself. Sherman says that Meursault walks off with apparently no specific destination in mind, with the feeble excuse that it is just as hot standing outside the chalet as it would be to walk down the beach.

For Sherman, Meursault is in bad faith when he says that he met the Arab and shot him by chance. That is, Meursault denies responsibility for his choices and blames everything on bad luck.

Two Meursaults: One in the Text, Another in the Commentaries

We saw earlier Solomon’s strange idea that there are two “Meursaults,” one the narrator and the other the narrated. This idea simply does not work.

However, while he may misremember, exaggerate, or downright lie, Meursault cannot be both an intelligent and effective storyteller, recounting a story of an educated and well-liked man, and also be a man barely capable of thought and understanding of the world around him, unable to reflect on their actions.

This “second Meursault,” who is blank, unimaginable, and not found anywhere in the novel, is located only in certain texts found in the scholarly literature on The Stranger. And here his “nothingness” serves a useful purpose. The character of Meursault is wiped clean and then re-imagined according to whatever story the commentator wants to tell. Accordingly, Meursault becomes the exemplar of the unexamined life for Solomon and a paradigm of bad faith for Sherman.

The irony is that in the text, this is exactly the approach taken by the prosecutor. Solomon, Sherman, and the prosecutor paint a picture of Meursault that is not supported by anything found in the text. If we are interested in Camus’ philosophy, it is the text itself that merits our close attention.

Thomism (the philosophical system founded by Thomas Aquinas) is intended to be an interrelated web of complementary concepts and arguments, akin to overlapping layers of a flower’s petals, which can only be appreciated by contemplating all its imbricated structures. Asking the question “Does God know evil?” occasions asking what evil is, what its cause is, what reasons God has for permitting it, what role it plays in providence, and what its consequences are.

Here, the first question is addressed.

Evil as Privation

How does Thomas Aquinas conceive of evil? He holds that evil is not a “thing”— a doctrine known as privatio boni (Latin for “privation of the good”), which dates back at least to Augustine of Hippo. All created essences possess being and contain, qua essences, no defect, and are good in that they bear a likeness to the being of God. In this way, the order of beings excludes evil from its essential nature. Put differently, God doesn’t directly create any evil thing. 

However, God has morally sufficient reasons for permitting corruption and privation in that created order (reasons we cannot detail here) through the agency of secondary causes—those creatures endowed by the Creator with the capacity to be their own causes, whether through natural laws or through the powers of voluntary action. The first grouping corresponds to the world of the physical sciences; the second refers to the spheres of moral interaction that we will into existence. 

Thomas Aquinas generally defines evil as “the privation of that which is connatural and due to a thing” (Book III, Ch. 7, Summa contra Gentiles). It consists either in a defect in the apprehension of good, in the case of moral evil, or in a deficient cause within the physical order of things, pertaining to one or more of the four Aristotelian causes. For example, a person limps, Aquinas says, only on account of some defect or “crookedness in the tibia” that hinders their power to walk (Book III, Ch. 10, Summa contra Gentiles). Moral evil, having to do with a failing in our powers to act, arises due to a misperception of the ends towards which we ought to be directed, whether misguided by our will or reason. 

In this way, evil always parasitizes what is good—it lives by living on what is good. It exists exploitatively, through some mal-achievement or some misconception. 

How God Knows Evil Exists Without Creating It

Some might think that God cannot know evil, since He knows only Himself, who is the sovereign good; and further, can neither tolerate the company of evil nor turn away from His own essence. Similarly, one might think that it would be beneath Him to contemplate ignoble things, such as the forms of mud, filth, or hair, let alone think eternally about every seemingly trivial detail or fact, such as an infinite number of tautologies or logical equivalences, or sets of endless and meaningless combinations of letters or words. 

One rebuttal Aquinas issues in response is that God must know even those things we might consider lowly since the order of the universe is nobler than any of its parts, which follows if the parts are directed toward the good of the whole. Thus, if God knew only the parts we consider dignified to the exclusion of the rest, it would render His knowledge less noble, not more so. Further, God knows all these things because he pours Himself out into all things as their Creator and First Cause.

Thomas Aquinas maintains that God knows evil things by virtue of His omniscience. He also knows particular evils in the world, and how they work to providentially fulfill His plan. However, only the first aspect will be discussed below. 

• That evil is evil and opposed to good is true, which an omniscient God would know to be true, implying that God knows evil. 
• God perfectly knows the form, that is, the perfection due to every created thing. Evil is the lack or absence of perfection due to a thing. To know the form of a thing perfectly is to know what it would look like if that form were somehow lacking in it. Thus, by knowing the form of things, or by knowing the complete reality of the good in things, he knows evil; 
• God creates both form and matter. Matter can actualize either toward what is not (privation) or toward what is (form), and God perfectly knows every possible state in the universe pertaining to material potentiality, being its Creator. As already said, Aquinas understands natural evil to arise when privation occurs within material potentiality. So, God would know evil;   
• In fashioning the universe, God arranged every part to work together for the perfection of the whole. This would require knowing how the parts would ward off specific types of harm. God thus possessed knowledge of evils in the context of how certain things were designed to remove them. 

These arguments are only part of the larger story of Thomism, and here we have barely begun to investigate a single petal of the flower mentioned earlier. Many questions remain unresolved, but perhaps that is not why they are important. His arguments unceasingly prompt further reflection on the divine nature, and his works are in that regard nearly unparalleled.