The One Where the Court Feels Uncomfortable

My biggest question after reading The Stranger is why was the whole court process the way it was? Why did they care so little about the crime itself? Why were they so determined and desperate to find anything they could to let Meursault off easy, while still focusing entirely on judging his soul? I don't know much about twentieth century legal proceedings; perhaps that's just how courts ran back then, but somehow I doubt it. Similar to Kafka’s slightly surreal world in The Metamorphosis, this world seems to be slightly off. If this reality is altered, then the big question is why? Why did Camus choose to alter reality in this way, and what does it contribute to the story?

I think that the court is meant to represent the reader, and in turn humanity as a whole, to show the power of an uncomfortable empathy. Nobody cared about Meursault’s oddness for the first part of the book. Despite Meursault being very upfront about his lack of strong emotion for or desire to marry Marie, she still stands by him all the way through his trial. Meursault is also easily able to make friends (Raymond, Marie, even Masson), even though he has little discernible personality and no social skills. Nobody seems to notice his strangeness, and if they do it doesn't bother them much. But once he commits a crime, all eyes turn towards his character. Suddenly everybody is scrutinizing his every action and ends up being repulsed by his strangeness. It kills them that they can't understand his crime or his motive. The court looks for every chance to just write the murder off with an understandable motive, but when Meursault doesn't give them one, they turn on him and dehumanize him to the point where they deny him his humanity. Compare the public eye to the reader. We found Meursault odd, sure, but it didn't bother us too much. I don't know about everyone else, but I even found his disassociation pretty relatable. Then he committed his crime and we became focused on motive. We spent multiple class periods trying to understand why Meursault killed the Arab, even though we all know we'll never be able to comprehend it.

Our incessant need to understand Meursault derives from our own fear of ourselves (in my amateur opinion of course). I'm sure most of us related to Meursault’s lack of emotion in part one to some degree, and those who didn't most likely had empathy for him. This empathy establishes a similarity between us and Meursault. When he kills a guy, this similarity turns on us. We subconsciously start to think that if it happened to Meursault, maybe it could happen to us. We could wake up one morning and kill somebody, just like that. So we try to find a reason so we can tell ourselves it won't happen to us. Anything to distance ourselves from Meursault and the crime, but he refuses to give us that relief. So instead we dehumanize him. If he's not truly human, we can cut all similarity out and chalk the crime up to his inhumanity. The court finally resorts to this reasoning, using it to give Meursault the ultimate punishment. 

Ultimately, I believe that the entire trial had nothing to do with Meursault himself and everything to do with the court wanting to get rid of their discomfort. Do you agree? I found a couple classmates who agree- so I know I'm at least not completely crazy. Do you think that this is Camus’s intention for the court?

Comments

  1. Ayat JaberNovember 13, 2017 at 8:01 AM

    When Meursault first shot the guy, I admit that I tried looking for the icerberg effect, a hidden motive, something that caused Meursault to shoot the guy. But I found that truly, the only reason was his uncomfiness from the hot sun. But I disagree with the subconscious thought of if it happened to Meursault, it could happen to us. This is because I didn't relate to Meursault in the first place, so I never felt any attachment to similarize myself with his actions. I think the court was just trying to pluck out the anomaly in society (they didn't really care about the Arabs anyway as colonizers) and dehumanize him because he wasn't like them, and we have a tend to fear people who are different than us. I don't think that Camus was trying to point out that we subconsciously fear Meursault's actions because of his similarity to us. However, i do see your point, and its pretty interesting to think about it that way, certainly plausible. Just a bit too much of a stretch for me

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  2. IzzyNovember 13, 2017 at 11:49 AM

    I agree with Ayat, I think that while The Stranger may be a critique on society in Algiers I don't think that most people would react the way Meursault did in the shooting scene. However I do definitely agree that the court's reaction and process for convicting Meursault were definitely strange to say the least and Camus' avoidance of talking about the Arab was dehumanizing towards him.

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  3. Dale RobbennoltNovember 13, 2017 at 3:43 PM

    I think that it's interesting that you said that "Our incessant need to understand Meursault derives from our own fear of ourselves." I think that there is definitely some of that, that people don't want to accept that someone could do something like this with no motive. I also had moments where I identified with Meursault in the beginning, but by the end it does feel much harder to associate with someone who can go this far. Some of the feelings he has at the beginning where he feels like he needs to show that he is following the procedures of emotion are familiar but I think that by the end we are almost forced to distance ourselves from him because of his crime and the lack of emotional reaction to it.

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  4. VicenteNovember 13, 2017 at 7:07 PM

    I definitely agree that the court functions as proxy for wider French society, that is appalled by and seeks to condemn Meursault's seeming lack of love and grief for his mother; but maybe Meursault is also being punished for his lack of ambition. Maybe Meursault is like a high school burnout that the school counselors are after, pushing him to make something of his life?

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