The Stranger: A Critique Of The Judicial System
By Ruby Mitchell
Meursault did not deserve to die. This is the mindset that I was in as I finished reading The Stranger, and I believe that this was Camus’ intention. Throughout the novel, Meursault is portrayed as a morally questionable character, often choosing to withhold judgment in times when judgment is completely necessary, and refusing to form solid opinions on people that the average person would disapprove of. Despite this moral ambiguity, Meursault is not a completely bad person, and Camus doesn’t try to depict him as such. Before the murder he commits, nothing about Meursault’s moral ambiguity ever actually strays into the territory of him being morally bad or corrupt in any way, he is only ever portrayed as neutral. The prosecutor in Meursault’s murder trial takes complete advantage of this moral ambiguity, and uses it to paint Meursault as a morally-vapid monster who is a threat to our society. The court focuses more on Meursault’s morality than his crime, choosing to talk more about the treatment of his mom and his response to her death than the events of the murder that he committed. To the court, the actual crime he committed is insignificant. The victim’s sister is never brought up to testify against Meursault––even though she logically should be one of the main witnesses for the prosecution’s case––and the man who Meursault offered a cigarette to at his mother’s vigil is brought up instead. Clearly this case is not about the crime itself, not about providing justice for the victim, it is really Meursault’s morality that is on trial.
The real crime that Meursault commits that leads to his death is his inability to play the court’s game. The mistake that Meursault makes in court is being too honest: he doesn’t have a motive, he doesn’t admit to feeling remorse, and he attempts to blame the murder on the sun. All of these explanations are true, but none of them fit what he is expected to say. As readers, we get a better view into Meursault’s thoughts and reasonings, and with that better perspective we get a more nuanced outlook on his crime and his overall moral character. While his reaction to his mom’s death might seem cold, the reader gets the added context of his weird, slightly rocky relationship with her. Later in the novel, we even get a concrete explanation of the way he went about understanding his mothers death: “Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again. Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her” (Camus 122). In this passage, we get our first glimpse of Meursault actually engaging with his mother’s death with any emotion other than indifference, and the emotion we see is one of gratitude. He feels that she must have been ready to die, and that is a good, beautiful thing. He doesn’t lack any care for his mother’s death, he just has a less negative view of death than the average person, which hinders his ability to grieve in the way that he’s expected to. The court doesn’t paint him this way, though. Instead, the court paints Meursault as an unloving son who cares more about smoking cigarettes and meeting new women than “properly” mourning his mother’s death. The court fabricates a bastardization of Meursault’s relationship with his mom, successfully painting him as a monster in the eyes of the jury.
The court also chooses to focus on Meursault’s lack of remorse for having committed the murder more than the fact that he committed it in the first place. This portrayal of Meursault is more true to his seemingly emotionless character, though the court still manages to change it to fit into their narrative that he is some sort of monster. Meursault himself agrees that he feels no remorse for this murder, acknowledging that “I couldn't help admitting that he was right. I didn't feel much remorse for what I'd done,” and later going on to clarify that “I had never been able to truly feel remorse for anything” (Camus 100). While this lack of remorse, or lack of care, for the crime that he committed does seem heartless, it’s not very hard to believe when considering the rest of Meursault’s character. Meursault might not be able to feel much remorse, but we don’t get solid evidence that he is able to feel any other type of emotion either. Meursault is apathetic when his girlfriend confesses her love to him and asks to marry him, reacts very calmly to his arrest and questioning, and doesn’t even seem to have any discernible reaction to being told that he was to be executed. While Meursault’s lack of remorse actually stems from an inability to truly feel any emotion, the court uses it to paint him as a careless criminal who kills without thinking twice about it, and uses that characterization to justify his execution.
Meursault is sentenced to be publicly killed “in the name of the French people,” which cements the fact that his trial was unjust and not properly executed (Camus 107). Meursault committed no crime against “the French people.” If anything, he committed a crime against the Arab people, but this colonial court would never have viewed that as a heinous enough crime to deserve the death penalty. The only crime that Meursault committed against the French people was mystifying them with his constant honesty and refusal to play into the games of the court. Meursault confused the court, and the prosecutor was able to take that confusion and spin it into terror and hatred, prompting the jury to come to the conclusion that Meursault deserved to die. Camus spends the entire novel establishing Meursault’s point of view and the rationale behind all of his actions. He then places us in a court full of people who are uninterested in understanding Meursault’s point of view or rationale, with this lack of understanding eventually leading to his death. Camus uses The Stranger to parody the unjust and superficial nature of the colonial Algerian judicial system, painting it as a system that disregards the testimony of the victim’s family, makes harsh and life-ending judgments based on evidence that fails to paint the whole picture, and punishes a man more for his social shortcomings than the crime that he committed.
Works Cited
Camus, Albert. The Stranger. Translated by Matthew Ward, Vintage International, 1989.
