Albert Camus, The Outsider, and The Circumstantial Nature of Life

‘My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.’

Camus' book 'The Outsider' feasts on the absurdity of life. The protagonist gets a death sentence after a sequence of events which led him to murder another man. Having said this, the writer 'plays' with the morality of the reader and also the absurdism of the protagonist's fate.

One topic that arises is the concept of the circumstantial nature of life. Meursalt, the protagonist, is the living manifestation of the randomness of living that Camus' eludes with his work. Towards the end of the book, the soon- to- be- hanged man, contemplates the meaninglessness of his existence. He exclaims, ‘I had lived my life a certain way when I could have lived in another way. I had done one thing when I might have done something else. What difference did it make? (…) Nothing, nothing mattered and I knew very well why’. For me this passage is painful in the sense that it exposes the absurdity of life and it’s senseless. It is the marrow of Camus’ book, and it equates to, So What? So what if the narrator is going to die? So what if he didn’t mourn his mother? So what if he was friend to a pimp?

The concept of 'absurd-ism' is also related with the plot of one’s life. I wonder, how much of our lives is circumstantial happenings?’ For instance, the very fact that I am writing this document now is part of the numerous of other things that I could be doing. If there was war in my country I would probably had other priorities. Or if I failed a test, it might have been due to my lack of understanding, my anxiety, the difficulty of the test, the dog barking all day and not letting me study, the weather outside being too nice to concentrate, a magma of all of these factors, or something else. Now thinking about the narrator it could very well be that he didn’t go to the beach that day, or that he had taken another route to the beach, or that he didn’t take the gun with him, or that it was raining. All of these ‘ors’ could have given him his chance of remaining a free man. Then, how much of our lives is actually ours? How much do we decide for it? And how much of an agency do we have in forming both ourselves and our lives?

A parallel inquiry regarding the subject of ‘circumstance’, is the validity of the evidence assumed in the legal system. In ‘The Outsider’ it becomes apparent that much of the so-called facts of the narrator’s life are actually just circumstantial clues that are constructed into a coherent criminal narrative. This act is illustrated during Meursault’s trial when his mother’s friend, Perez, is asked to stand as a witness. During his interrogation he says, ‘You know I was very distraught myself. So I didn’t notice anything.’ When the prosecutor asks him whether he had seen the son crying, he answers‘no’. But when the lawyer asks whether he had seen him not crying, he responds with a 'no' again. This incident shows the storytelling qualities of a trial, for it is clear that each party has a role to play. The prosecutor to condemn, and the lawyer to defend. Consequently, each part takes bits of information from the sporadic actions of the suspect and weave it into a story of either innocence or guilt. Consequently, the fate of the man in the spotlight, is at the mercy of an effective narrative. Coming back to the idea of evidence, what constitutes then evidence both in court and in life?

It seems that one is constantly on the lookout for people throwing evidence either in favor or against oneself.

Are we formulated as individuals by circumstantial evidence? And is the judicial system a microcosm of the circumstantial nature of human identity?

* Painting by Cara Gonier

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