The Stranger

by Albert Camus

would like to know whether I had gone back to the spring by myself intending to kill the Arab. “No,” I said. Well, then, why was I armed and why did I return to precisely that spot? I said it just happened that way.

Doesn't claim to have any agency

He said I hadn’t wanted to see Maman, that I had smoked and slept some, and that I had had some coffee. It was then I felt a stirring go through the room and for the first time I realized that I was guilty.

Interesting that this is the turning point for him

The old man looked embarrassed and said, “I know I was wrong to do it. But I couldn’t refuse the cigarette when monsieur offered it to me.” Lastly, I was asked if I had anything to add. “Nothing,” I said, “except that the witness is right. It’s true, I did offer him a cigarette.”

Described as if smoking is the real crime at hand--seems to be a big enough deal that it imposes on the legitimacy of the caretakers testimony

He hesitated and then he said that he was the one who offered me the coffee. My lawyer was exultant and stated loudly that the jury would take note of the fact. But the prosecutor shouted over our heads and said, “Indeed, the gentlemen of the jury will take note of the fact. And they will conclude that a stranger may offer a cup of coffee, but that beside the body of the one who brought him into the world, a son should have refused it.”

Psychology tactics, or just grasping at straws?

He was asked how I had acted that day and he replied, “You understand, I was too sad. So I didn’t see anything. My sadness made it impossible to see anything. Because for me it was a very great sadness. And I even fainted. So I wasn’t able to see monsieur.”

I actually love this passage

The spectators laughed. And my lawyer, rolling up one of his sleeves, said with finality, “Here we have a perfect reflection of this entire trial: everything is true and nothing is true!”

The prosecutor then rose and, very gravely and with what struck me as real emotion in his voice, his finger pointing at me, said slowly and distinctly, “Gentlemen of the jury, the day after his mother’s death, this man was out swimming, starting up a dubious liaison, and going to the movies, a comedy, for laughs. I have nothing further to say.”

So odd that his character is dismissed over these trifle things with little focus on murder itself... Limitations of moralism?

But all of a sudden Marie began to sob, saying it wasn’t like that, there was more to it, and that she was being made to say

the opposite of what she was thinking, that she knew me and I hadn’t...

Hardly anyone listened after that when Masson testified that I was an honest man “and I’d even say a decent one.”

Seems evidence to the contrary is ignored, but it should be in this case... Dubious ethical dilemma

Raymond responded that it was just chance. The prosecutor retorted that chance already had a lot of misdeeds on its conscience in this case.

I was his friend and accomplice. They had before them the basest of crimes, a crime made worse than sordid by the fact that they were dealing with a monster, a man without morals.

“The same man who the day after his mother died was indulging in the most shameful debauchery killed a man for the most trivial of reasons and did so in order to settle an affair of unspeakable vice.”

I know I'm morally obligated to despise Mersault, but I can't help but side with him a bit. This prosecutor is bonkers

“Come now, is my client on trial for burying his mother or for killing a man?”

the prosecutor rose to his feet again, adjusted his robe, and declared that only someone with the naiveté of his esteemed colleague could fail to appreciate that between these two sets of facts there existed a profound, fundamental, and tragic relationship. “Indeed,” he loudly exclaimed, “I accuse this man of burying his mother with crime in his heart!” This pronouncement seemed to have a strong effect on the people in the courtroom.

Crime of intents equated to crimes of action... Is this fair? Hard to say

And yet something had changed, since it was back to my cell that I went to wait for the next day … as if familiar paths traced in summer skies could lead as easily to prison as to the sleep of the innocent.

Even in the prisoner’s dock it’s always interesting to hear people talk about you. And during the summations by the prosecutor and my lawyer, there was a lot said about me, maybe more about me than about my crime. But were their two speeches so different after all? My lawyer raised his arms and pleaded guilty, but with an explanation. The prosecutor waved his hands and proclaimed my guilt, but without an explanation.

Love this!!!

In a way, they seemed to be arguing the case as if it had nothing to do with me. Everything was happening without my participation. My fate was being decided without anyone so much as asking my opinion.

Limited to live outside his control--has no say in his fate

It took me a few minutes to understand the last part because he kept saying “his mistress” and to me she was Marie.

I thought his way of viewing the events had a certain consistency. What he was saying was plausible.

This man, gentlemen, this man is intelligent. You heard him, didn’t you? He knows how to answer. He knows the value of words. And no one can say that he acted without realizing what he was doing.” I was listening, and I could hear that I was being judged intelligent. But I couldn’t quite understand how an ordinary man’s good qualities could become crushing accusations against a guilty man.

Catch-22 for Mersault, guilty no matter what he does

But naturally, given the position I’d been put in, I couldn’t talk to anyone in that way. I didn’t have the right to show any feeling or goodwill.

And I tried to listen again, because the prosecutor started talking about my soul. He said that he had peered into it and that he had found nothing, gentlemen of the jury. He said the truth was that I didn’t have a soul and that nothing human, not one of the moral principles that govern men’s hearts, was within my reach.

But he wasn’t afraid to say it: my callousness inspired in him a horror nearly greater than that which he felt at the crime of parricide. And also according to him, a man who is morally guilty of killing his mother severs himself from society in the same way as the man who raises a murderous hand against the father who begat him. In any case, the one man paved the way for the deeds of the other, in a sense foreshadowed and even legitimized them. “I am convinced, gentlemen,” he added, raising his voice, “that you will not think it too bold of me if I suggest to you that the man who is seated in the dock is also guilty of the murder to be tried in this court tomorrow.

Yikes

He stated that I had no place in a society whose most fundamental rules I ignored and that I could not appeal to the same human heart whose elementary response I knew nothing of. “I ask you for this man’s head,” he said, “and I do so with a heart at ease. For if in the course of what has been a long career I have had occasion to call for the death penalty, never as strongly as today have I felt this painful duty made easier, lighter, clearer by the certain knowledge of a sacred imperative and by the horror I feel when I look into a man’s face and all I see is a monster.”

Is he not callously calling for the murder of Mersault himself? Lines of moral and immoral are being blurred

At one point, though, I listened, because he was saying, “It is true I killed a man.” He went on like that, saying “I” whenever he was speaking about me. I was completely taken aback. I leaned over to one of the guards and asked him why he was doing that. He told me to keep quiet, and a few seconds later he added, “All lawyers do it.” I thought it was a way to exclude me even further from the case, reduce me to nothing, and, in a sense, substitute himself for me. But I think I was already very far removed from that courtroom.

I barely even heard when my lawyer, wrapping up, exclaimed that the jury surely would not send an honest, hardworking man to his death because he had lost control of himself for one moment, and then he asked them to find extenuating circumstances for a crime for which I was already suffering the most agonizing of punishments—eternal remorse.

I didn’t look in Marie’s direction. I didn’t have time to, because the presiding judge told me in bizarre language that I was to have my head cut off in a public square in the name of the French people.

All I care about right now is escaping the machinery of justice, seeing if there’s any way out of the inevitable.

I can’t count the times I’ve wondered if there have ever been any instances of condemned men escaping the relentless machinery, disappearing before the execution or breaking through the cordon of police. Then I blame myself every time for not having paid enough attention to accounts of executions. A man should always take an interest in those things. You never know what might happen.

The papers were always talking about the debt owed to society. According to them, it had to be paid. But that doesn’t speak to the imagination. What really counted was the possibility of escape, a leap to freedom, out of the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give whatever chance for hope there was. Of course, hope meant being cut down on some street corner, as you ran like mad, by a random bullet. But when I really thought it through, nothing was going to allow me such a luxury. Everything was against it; I would just be caught up in the machinery again.

Echoes of Sisyphus here

How had I not seen that there was nothing more important than an execution, and that when you come right down to it, it was the only thing a man could truly be interested in? If I ever got out of this prison I would go and watch every execution there was.

I’d realized that the most important thing was to give the condemned man a chance. Even one in a thousand was good enough to set things right. So it seemed to me that you could come up with a mixture of chemicals that if ingested by the patient (that’s the word I’d use: “patient”) would kill him nine times out of ten. But he would know this—that would be the one condition. For by giving it some hard thought, by considering the whole thing calmly, I could see that the trouble with the guillotine was that you had no chance at all, absolutely none.

The fact was that it had been decided once and for all that the patient was to die. It was an open-and-shut case, a fixed arrangement, a tacit agreement that there was no question of going back on. If by some extraordinary chance the blade failed, they would just start over. So the thing that bothered me most was that the condemned man had to hope the machine would work the first time. And I say that’s wrong. And in a way I was right. But in another way I was forced to admit that that was the whole secret of good organization. In other words, the condemned man was forced into a kind of moral collaboration. It was in his interest that everything go off without a hitch.

Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about. In my prison, when the sky turned red and a new day slipped into my cell, I found out that she was right.

I explained to him that I wasn’t desperate. I was just afraid, which was only natural. “Then God can help you,” he said. “Every man I have known in your position has turned to Him.” I acknowledged that that was their right. It also meant that they must have had the time for it. As for me, I didn’t want anybody’s help, and I just didn’t have the time to interest myself in what didn’t interest me.

He was expressing his certainty that my appeal would be granted, but I was carrying the burden of a sin from which I had to free myself. According to him, human justice was nothing and divine justice was everything. I pointed out that it was the former that had condemned me. His response was that it hadn’t washed away my sin for all that. I told him I didn’t know what a sin was. All they had told me was that I was guilty. I was guilty, I was paying for it, and nothing more could be asked of me.

I know that at one time or another you’ve wished for another life.” I said of course I had, but it didn’t mean any more than wishing to be rich, to be able to swim faster, or to have a more nicely shaped mouth. It was all the same. But he stopped me and wanted to know how I pictured this other life. Then I shouted at him, “One where I could remember this life!” and that’s when I told him I’d had enough. He wanted to talk to me about God again, but I went up to him and made one last attempt to explain to him that I had only a little time left and I didn’t want to waste it on God. He tried to change the subject by asking me why I was calling him “monsieur” and not “father.” That got me mad, and I told him he wasn’t my father; he wasn’t even on my side.

He seemed so certain about everything, didn’t he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman’s head. He wasn’t even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man.

Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he. Throughout the whole absurd life I’d lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living. What did other people’s deaths or a mother’s love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we’re all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? Couldn’t he see, couldn’t he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. And he would be condemned, too. What would it matter if he were accused of murder and then executed because he didn’t cry at his mother’s funeral?

They were announcing departures for a world that now and forever meant nothing to me. For the first time in a long time I thought about Maman. I felt as if I understood why at the end of her life she had taken a “fiance,” why she had played at beginning again. Even there, in that home where lives were fading out, evening was a kind of wistful respite. So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again. Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her. And I felt ready to live it all again too. As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.