Meursault's Peculiar Stoicism

Throughout The Stranger, Meursault repeats his mantra that nothing matters, none of his decisions, his emotions, or his circumstances. Instead of showing how cold or strange Meursault is, it highlights something else to me about how Meursault copes with existence. 

After his mother’s funeral, Meursault returns home thinking “that anyway one more Sunday was over, that Maman was buried now, that I was going back to work, and that, really, nothing had changed” (Camus 24). What makes Meursault’s train of thought so bizarre? Meursault displays an extreme form of stoicism where he views most things in life as pointless. As readers, we expect some kind of reflection, we expect the funeral to change Meursault in some way. But in his mind, all the ups and downs of life take people to the same place in the end. A typical protagonist would react viscerally to the death of their mother, which might set the stage for the entire book. Instead, Meursault assures us right away, that he won’t be experiencing any dramatic character growth. 

A little later in the book, when Meursault is faced with potential promotion and life in Paris, he shows similar indifference but goes on to explain, “When I was a student, I had lots of ambitions like that. But when I had to give up my studies I learned very quickly that none of it really mattered” (Camus 41). This passage matters because it was one of the first hints to me that Meursault hadn’t always been as apathetic as he is in the novel’s timeframe. Something changed in his life that transformed his perspective on life for better or worse. At some point, he’d decided to stop caring. Interestingly, it was more or less working for him… until it wasn’t. We talked in class about the possibility of Meursault having an atypical mind, or that he would be diagnosed with some mental disorder in modern times, however, this passage makes me think there’s nothing inherently atypical about his brain, he didn’t behave the way he does in the book his entire life. His narration leaves us only to speculate what his life has been and arrange what we can from scattered comments he makes about his past. 

After his trial has ended and Meursault knows that he’s getting the death penalty, Meursault has a heated interaction with a chaplain. At this moment he thinks to himself, “I had been right, I was still right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn’t done that…. Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he” (Camus 121). This is another of those rare moments in the book where Meursault reflects on himself. Saying that “I had been right, I was still right” that nothing mattered. It seems that he believes that his death was inevitable despite his behavior, that even without the death penalty, he would still die someday and so nothing is important. Meursault’s extreme form of stoicism got him into a mess but still ended up reinforcing his belief. Meursault takes his circumstances as a testament to the fact that he’s not really in control and that he never was. This belief makes us all uneasy and makes the court at Meursault's trial uneasy, and so they force Meursault to carry that belief to his end.