On page 121 of The Stranger, Camus throws a lot at us. On the margin of my page, I wrote “unpack this”, as a lazy annotator like myself often does, counting on fruitful class conversations to come up with the answers to my questions about the book. But as a still packed, overflowing suitcase sitting in the corner of a room after a vacation, I have yet to unpack it because I know the action of unpacking it will be long and complicated.
If you were to read this passage without context you might think this is the stream of consciousness of a mad man or woman because it sounds random and disorderly but in reality this passage brings together one of the central existentialist thoughts of the book. His statement that everyone is “just as guilty” because “all [would be] condemned one day” is central to the idea of the inevitability of death. I think what he is saying is that no matter how one lives theire life, we all have the same verdict therefore the same worth. He is stating that death is the ultimate equalizer. He states that “Salamano’s dog was worth just as much as his wife” because they are both going to die one day.
I think that in this page we see the traditional view of existentialism: “Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. And so did he.” Thankfully, Camus unpacks this idea further to give us some will to go on. He states that “[e]verybody was privileged. There are only privileged people.” I took this to mean that life is a privilege and that we should feel liberating knowing that we are all guilty. It is interesting because in many religions, people are thought of as sinners and, similarly, Meursault (one of the biggest strangers to religion) replicates this idea by saying that everyone is guilty. Where they differ is that religion focuses on the afterlife despite of sins and Meursault talks about death as our final and absolute condemnation. Meursault is using the ideas of religion to turn them on their head and state that death is death and there is nothing more and nothing less.
I see how this view can be liberating, but at the same time when I read this passage I thought about how it opened the door to treat people unjustly. The quote about Salamano's dog and wife having the same value really caught me as existentialism being used for either the greater good or for evil. Either the dog is going to get treated really well, or this comparison can justify his wife not being treated well. As we know though from reading the book, this view is more so used for evil, perfectly illustrated when Meursault killed the Arab.
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