A Reflection upon Albert Camus’ L’Etranger:
Meursault the Redeemer

By Hugh Dichmont

Albert Camus, absurdist philosopher and author, once described the main protagonist of his 1942 novel L’Etranger¹, known to the reader simply as Meursault, as “the only Jesus we deserve”.

Camus’ biblical comparison should not be read merely as a rebellious aggravation aimed at the Christian faith, a claim he refuted²; It is an analogy consistent with his literary intent and philosophy, as detailed in his seminal essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe³, also published in 1942.

At the base of Camus’ philosophy was a belief that life was essentially devoid of one singular, definitive meaning or purpose, and that God was a mythical fabrication. He argued that rather than making existence cripplingly worthless, the dismissal of a supernatural hereafter should compel man to seek a better life for himself during his lifetime. Paraphrasing Kierkegaard, in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, Camus suggests “Earthly hope”, by which he seems to mean traditional forms of faith, “must be killed; only then can one be saved by true hope.”

Camus’ mistrust of the value of religion, Christianity in particular, is inherent in L’Etranger, though it is not the terminally devout that face the brunt of his criticism. He reproaches the entire western value system, which he seems to intimate is a corollary of the blame culture that Christianity engenders.

During Meursault’s court hearing, in which he is being tried for the murder of an Arab man, friends of his late mother are called to the stand as character witnesses. Meursault’s detached, emotionless disposition in the wake of his mother’s death is seen as an indication of the innate heartlessness of a man seemingly capable, at least to judge and jury, of anything. The prosecutor goes so far as to indict Meursault of “burying his mother like a heartless criminal” before urging the jury: “The wholly negative ethic of tolerance must give way to the stricter but loftier ethic of justice.”

The presence of such moral imbalance is clearly of satirical intent, with Camus seeming to imply, through the nature of Meursault’s court case proceedings, that the ingrained social morality of the Christian west is a paranoid affair, leaving one guilty in need of proof to the contrary. One needs look no further than Original Sin to recognise the root of Camus’ argument.

Meursault falls outside of what is perceived to be ‘normal’ within the standards of his society, and is condemned as an outsider and a misfit. It is for their mistrust in his coldness that he is sentenced, or rather, their conviction that coldness towards the death of one’s mother is a precursor to depravity. What is seen as immorality in Meursault is actually integrity. He is not unable to cry at his mother’s funeral; he doesn’t feel like crying. So he doesn’t. It is in the assumption of how one is meant to act, in this particular example what grief should look like, that condemns Meursault.