Up until the end of chapter 6, the plot and tone of The Stranger remains static and monotonous. The story begins to speed up rapidly in the last couple pages, ending with the narrator shooting and killing an Arab man. The last three sentences reveal the narrator's thoughts:
"I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness" (Camus, 59).
I got the impression that the narrator seems to think of his crime as a before and after moment, a defining event in the his life. Meursault places an emphasis on how he had been happy before he shot the man, and afterwards he knocked on the 'door of unhappiness,' perhaps giving the reader an insight into the tone of the next part of the book.
The very nature of a before and after moment is that it separates one's life into different sections. Because The Stranger is separated into different parts, this may be another way of the author indicating the significant of the murder.
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