Then I fired four more times into the lifeless body, where the bullets sank without leaving a trace. If Mersault is the only Christ we deserve, what does that make us? Especially in light of the following passage, the crucial moment at the end of the first part of the book: That Christ quote may also point the way to something bleaker. I don't think there's anything wrong with that interpretation – it is probably the most obvious, and possibly the most likely. Mersault is a kind of martyr – which may explain why Camus once described him as "the only Christ that we deserve". His head is going to be removed from his body not so much because of the crime he committed, but because he refuses to bow to convention, and refuses to be dishonest. On this interpretation Mersault is largely a victim of circumstances of the bad fortune of walking back onto that part of the beach when he did of the hot sun of the irrational mores of the people who oversee his trial.
One possible interpretation is that Mersault is killed because he failed to do what society expected of him at the time of his mother's funeral. Camus doesn't claim to know all the answers, or even all the questions, but he does have the novelist's ability to make you wonder what those questions might be, and to reveal all the complex mess of human psychology. This is no screed setting out the rules of existentialism, or even absurdism. Mersault's story isn't a simply framework for a philosophy, it is something in and of itself. So I should preface this remark by admitting I may be doing Sartre an injustice – but from what I can remember, another big difference between Nausea and The Outsider is a refusal to preach. My own battle with Camus' frenemy's famous book took place quite a few years ago, and I came out the loser. It may be plain, but only in the way of a well-turned piece of wood, where the surface is smooth, yet also reveals all the undulations of the grain.Īnyway, anyone who has slogged through Sartre's Nausea will appreciate Camus' qualities as a storyteller. My French isn't up to it, and it's no particular insight to point our that his writing is vivid, and elegant. I set that down both as an insight into his attitude to writing and as a good reason for me to avoid going into a practical criticism-style essay into his prose. There's a famous Camus quote that "saying things badly increases the unhappiness of the world".
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