“A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn’t mean anything but that I didn’t think so” (Camus 34).
The most unsettling thing about Albert Camus’ The Stranger is its lack of emotion.
The story opens with Meursault, our main character, receiving a telegram informing him of his mother’s death. Instead of emotion, instead of grief, Meursault does the unthinkable, and shows no reaction. He goes through the motions of traveling to his mother’s home, attending the funeral, and leaves immediately after. Meursault has no sadness, no anger or happiness, just an emotionless state of being.
Furthermore, while he’s numb to his surroundings, he holds no room for love. Meursault forms a relationship with his co-worker, Marie, but once again, the reader is struck by his emotionless reaction. It’s discomfiting to watch Meursault’s life displayed as devoid of love, uncanny as everything seems to be meaningless to him.
Camus juxtaposes Meursault’s blank state of living with normality. When Meursault shoots a man, his lawyer is disgusted with his lack of remorse, his lack of grief, his lack of any feeling, that which separates us from the inanimate. Meursault is not immoral he is amoral, simply without the ability to distinguish right from wrong.
This idea of “right” and “wrong” relates to love verses fear. Each emotion within itself is not wrong, yet what humans choose to do with each feeling can spin out of control, whether for the better or the worse. Is having neither emotion better than taking the risk of feeling something?
This I believe: no. We were created to feel, we were made to love, and fear can work in wondrous ways.
Theme: Fear and love may be hazardous, but it is far more dangerous to feel nothing at all.
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