Existentialism is a Humanism

Sartre begins his analysis by noting that although The Stranger was immediately acclaimed, it was also unique, “a stranger [...] from the other side of the horizon,” and hard to understand because of its “gratuitousness” and “ambiguity” (73).

Rather than trying to “prove anything” (73), Sartre says, the novel tells the story of a man, Mersault, who reacts to his mother’s death by going swimming, starting a futile affair, seeing a film, killing a man “because of the sun,” and then stating on the night before his execution that he is happy and hopes a large crowd will “welcome him with cries of hatred” at the scaffold (74).

Sartre describes Mersault as “an innocent” to whom moral categories do not apply, a man whose absurdity is “both a factual state and the lucid awareness that some people acquire from that state. The ‘absurd’ man is one who does not hesitate to draw inevitable conclusions from a fundamental absurdity” (74). Sartre defines this fundamental absurdity as the gap between the eternal, the drive toward unity, and the concern one feels for one’s projects, on the one hand, and the finitude of human existence, the division between mind and body, and the futility of all human efforts, on the other.

Sartre places Camus within the French tradition that includes Pascal, the precursors of Nietzsche, Rousseau, Poincaré, Duhem, Meyerson, and Muras. According to Sartre, Camus does not aim to be completely original so much as to “[stretch] his ideas to the limit” (76). Fully recognizing the absurdity of man’s existence in the world means recognizing that “the world is chaos, a ‘divine equivalence born of anarchy’; and tomorrow does not exist, since we all die” (77). In such a world, the human being is a stranger with neither a home to return to nor a paradise to look forward to. Being “a fully conscious being” is what prevents man from being part of the world; rather, he is set apart, adrift: “It is this preposterous reason that sets me against all of creation” (77).

Sartre describes what he calls “a passion of the absurd”: someone who is absurd in Sartre/Camus’s special sense of that word “asserts himself by revolting” (78). Because there is no God who determines what is good and evil, “one experience is as good as another [...] what matters is simply to acquire as many of them as possible” before death (78). The hero of Camus’s novel is such a man, someone for whom all values have collapsed and who takes a purely quantitative approach to experience: “everything has the same value, whether it be writing The Possessed or drinking a cup of coffee” (81).

Sartre explains that Camus’s philosophical text The Myth of Sisyphus contains the key to interpreting The Stranger. The Myth of Sisyphus has neither a political nor a social message; it is simply a treatment of absurdity that puts into philosophical argument the same ideas that are presented in The Stranger via imagery. Sartre argues that if Camus had wanted to persuade the reader to accept a certain message, he could have written about “a civil servant lording it over his family, who is suddenly struck with the intuition of the absurd, which he resists for a while before finally resolving to live out the fundamental absurdity of his condition” (81). However, Mersault is a far more ambiguous character whose “dominant character trait is a pitiless lucidity” (82).

For Sartre, Mersault displays the freedom felt by the condemned man, which Camus describes in Sisyphus (84). All the same, Mersault “remains singularly impenetrable, even from a vantage point of the absurd” (85). In Sisyphus, Camus mentions the “inner gnawing [...] which stems from the blinding presence of death,” but Mersault appears indifferent to his impending death (85).

Sartre remarks that Camus distinguishes between the feeling of the absurd, which a person experiences, and the idea of the absurd, which a person derives from the feeling. While Sisyphus communicates the mere idea of the absurd, The Stranger conveys the feeling. It is “a novel of discrepancy, divorce, and disorientation” that presents the formless and disunified experience of life along with “the edifying reconstruction of this reality by human reasoning and speech” (86). Confronted by a “rational transposition” of reality, the reader is disoriented and experiences the feeling of the absurd, “that is, of our inability to conceive, using our concepts and our words, what occurs in the world” (86).

Sartre analyzes Mersault’s laconism in terms of Camus’s statement in The Myth of Sisyphus that “A man is more of a man because of what he does not say than what he does say” (86). Mersault exemplifies this statement, keeping a “virile silence” (86) both when questioned in the courtroom and when asked by his mistress for a declaration of love. Sartre assimilates Mersault’s silence to Camus’s silence, the attempt to “be silent with words [...] convey the unthinkable and disorderly succession of presents through concepts” (87-88) and describes Camus as having used a new technique to achieve his aims.

In discussing this technique, Sartre addresses two writers to whom Camus has been compared: Kafka and Hemingway. According to Sartre, Camus is quite unlike Kafka. While for Kafka “the universe is full of signs that we cannot understand; there is something behind the scenery”; for Camus, “the tragedy of human existence lies in the absence of any transcendence” (88). Unlike Kafka’s heroes, Mersault is essentially at ease within a senseless universe.

For Sartre, Camus much more closely resembles Hemingway. Both writers employ short sentences, each of which “refuses to exploit the momentum gained from the preceding one” (89), with each sentence effectively an isolated snapshot. However, Sartre says, Hemingway’s style is consistent and appears to reflect his personal voice. In contrast, Camus’s style in The Stranger is deliberate. The short sentences of the novel are a departure from Sisyphus’s more “ceremonious” (89) style, though The Stranger does contain a few lyrical passages that appear to express Camus’s personal style.

The terse prose of The Stranger is one aspect of Camus’s method; according to Sartre, the other major technique is the plot, which depicts “man’s inhumanity” (90) and provokes a feeling of uneasiness. Sartre describes Camus as “insert[ing] a glass partition between the reader and his characters”; that is, Camus presents us with a narrative composed of mere facts and recognizable human gestures that have been emptied of meaning: “Things are transparent and meanings opaque” (91).

Sartre connects Camus’s narrative technique, which presents a series of unconnected, meaningless moments, to “the analytic assumption that any reality is reducible to a sum of elements” (92). This interpretation sheds light on both Mersault’s attitude to his own death (his life has “‘no tomorrow’ [and] is merely a series of instants” (93)) and the novel’s Hemingwayesque style of “clipped sentences that imitate the discontinuity of time” (93). Each sentence represents a discrete moment, a whole discrete existence.

Similarly, Sartre notes, Camus avoids presenting causal links, referring as rarely as possible to any preceding sentence, and then only using words that “evoke nothing but disjunction, opposition, or mere addition” (95). Relations between spatiotemporal units are severed. Dialogue is compressed and often presented in the form of indirect discourse so that “spoken phrases appear to have no more significance than narrative descriptions” (97).

Thus, Sartre says, The Stranger should not be thought of as a story, “for a story explains and coordinates as it narrates” (98). Nor should it really be called a novel, since according to Sartre that “requires continuous duration, development, and the manifest presence of irreversible time” (98). Sartre ends his essay with the claim that The Stranger, as a “succession of inert presents that allows us to see, from underneath, the mechanical economy of a deliberately staged piece of writing” (98) represents most of all one of Voltaire’s tales.