Salamano and Meursault

“From a distance I noticed old Salamano standing on the doorstep. He looked flustered. When we got closer, I saw that he didn’t have his dog. He was looking all over the place, turning around, peering into the darkness of the entryway, muttering incoherently, and then he started searching the street again with his little red eyes… “‘ Pay money for that bastard- ha! He can damn well die!’ And he started cursing the dog” (39).

“When [his wife] died he had been very lonely. So he asked a shop buddy for a dog and he’d gotten this one very young. He’d had to feed it from a bottle… ‘But he was a good dog just the same’” (44).

Originally, I was going to talk about the motif of the sun and the heat, but I decided to discuss something that I’m not quite sure I understand, but here goes. This might be a stretch, but I feel like a parallel can be drawn between Salamano and Meursault. Salamano’s situation is ironic because he routinely abuses his dog and shows no affection or care for it, yet when the dog disappears while they are out, Salamano is extremely distraught and doesn’t know what to do. He tells Meursault that the dog was all he had left after his wife died. It’s ironic because he says that he cares for the dog while his actions clearly show otherwise. Meursault’s situation seems to similar because while he engages and spends a lot of time with friends like Celeste, Raymond, Marie, Masson, etc., yet he does not want to grow that close to them. Marie wants to marry Meursault and though he is neutral, he says that he does not love Marie. They both seem to be torn between two opposite sides of a dilemma.

Another way that I thought a parallel could be drawn was their respective difficulties with emotions. We’ve clearly seen Meursault’s lack of emotions with his almost dismissive attitude towards his mother’s death and his feelings or lack thereof for Marie. Meursault almost seems to be robotic with his lack of emotions and also lack of ambition. When he is offered a great promotion to work in Paris, he rejects it because he is used to his routine, another important part of his character. However, before Meursault fires the gun at the end of part one, it is mentioned that “the sun was the same as it had been the day I’d buried Maman” (58). Whether intentional or not, by inserting this sentence, Camus shows that Meursault does have some emotions. By relating a part of the environment with the funeral, even if unintentional, it makes Meursault seem more human by connecting heavily emotional events together.

Salamano also seems to be a fairly single emotion character. Salamano goes on a walk everyday with his talk where he yells the same words at the dog and they always walk the same route. He seems to have no caring feelings for his dog, but once the dog is gone, we are able to see more of Salamano. His wife died and to help with his loneliness, he got the dog. He cared for the dog and actually admits that it was a good dog. While both Meursault and Salamano appear emotionally limited (one more than the other), there are phrases and sentences that contradict their average characters. Why do you think Salamano is an important character in the story and what’s the meaning of his dog? What meaning does he bring that other characters cannot?