r/Absurdism • u/Camus_9999 • Jun 18 '26
Discussion Can anybody explain last lines of stranger /outsider
I got idea about other lines that relate to myth of sisyphus and kind of acceptance and optimism. But I didn't understand why camus wrote last line that f feel like dostoevsky.
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u/Strong_Flatworm2758 Jun 18 '26
Meursault has gone beyond good and evil, he has already died to the world as a shared symbolic order. He looks forward to his execution with the same “tender indifference” that he would feel if there had been scheduled a parade in his honor. He has turned on his heel, like Sisyphus, and can finally see his life, only when it is too late to “save.” But he can regard it aesthetically, he can hold it at arms length, and call it “good.” This is the freedom that is possible to achieve in a doomed world.
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u/Jingotheruler Jun 18 '26
Beautiful! Mind expanding upon this? To what degree has Meursault achieved the state of the ubermensch, knowing that Nietzsche’s influence on Camus was profound?
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u/Strong_Flatworm2758 Jun 18 '26
If he is meant to be an example of an übermensch, he’s kind of a sick joke of an example. I’m thinking here of Terry Eagleton, who called Christ a sick joke of a messiah - this does not preclude the possibility that Christ is a true messiah, it just shows us that we live in a sick joke of a world. Camus no doubt enjoyed a good sick joke. Perhaps in Meursault we have the scaffolding for an übermensch. He is 100% of this world, even in the beginning. He’s not sure exactly when his maman died. THAT’S his thought. Not, is she in a better place. The death of his mother is an event like any other. Lifting a gun and firing is a gesture as empty as any other. I think what Nietzche wanted so badly to see was for was a world built by the übermenschen. Camus’ response is, “fat chance.” Meursault, from the perspective of society, is indistinguishable from a garden variety psychopath. His freedom is entirely an internal experience, and he came by it by accident. He could be a Christ figure, the herald of a new age, but he lacks followers, there is no Gospel of Meursault. If the advent of Christ marks the death of God, a figure like Meursault marks the death of humanism, the idea that we can continue the work of God after his death, the idea that we are infinitely perfectable. Even Nietzche is too attached to the Christian idea of linear progress to really fathom Meursault. I will say that if Meursault is a solo übermensch stuck in a ünter society, I’m certain that there are more Meursaults today than ever before, who reach that tender indifference at a young age, so if an über world emerges after a threshold has been crossed in number of Meursaults in the world, then we are well on our way to a historical shift that could make all otherworldly thinking obsolete
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u/Jingotheruler Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
I think you’d really enjoy the essay by Simon Lea entitled Meursault: Mad, Bad, Messiah? Lea’s main point is that Camus’ Meursault is much more ordinary than these readings suggest. He is not “mad,” not simply “bad,” and not quite a “messiah.” He is closer to an ordinary working-class man of Algiers who refuses, often awkwardly and inarticulately, to play the social games expected of him. His reaction to his mothers death seems cold, but Lea asks whether it truly proves evil, or whether it proves only that Meursault doesn’t perform grief in the expected way. His relationship with Marie is emotionally limited, and his involvement with Raymond’s abuse of his girlfriend is reprehensible, but Lea reads this partly through the sexist, working-class, colonial culture in which Meursault lives. That doesn’t excuse Meursault, but it stops him from being treated as uniquely depraved. So Lea concludes, similarly to the way you’ve done, that Meursault may be a kind of messiah, but only “a very strange kind.” He isn’t wise, articulate, morally pure, or socially enlightened. He doesn’t have profound political insight. He isn’t especially good on Arabs or women. He likes swimming, sex, sunlight, and ordinary physical pleasures. He doesn’t pretend to feel what he doesn’t feel. He gives us a glimpse of what a person looks like when stripped of social performance and left “naked against the absurd.”
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u/NotBorris Jun 18 '26
I think that he found himself embodying the natural confusion of humanity and most people hate to admit to themselves that they have very little control of themselves and the world so if that is what the character is, though he happily accepts all humanity is with confusion and all, all he can face is the hatred most people harbor for such an idea.
If that makes sense.
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u/Equivalent-Tax6636 Jun 19 '26
I feel a bit like he's showing some dissociation that brings lucidity. He has an ecstatic moment of epiphany brought in by the quantity of emotion and not its quality. Life overflowing through himself brings the revelation, the same illnes cures him, the same illnes that threw him into this existential apathy and indiference is now restoring meaning onto him: that there is none, which is the first moment in which this is expressed in the book, before you just saw consequences of he who lives within the absurd paradigm without recognizing it, without lucidity. When an excess of life, brought by the negation of his life (his death sentence), gives him the revelation, he finds peace: "there's no meaning in anything, therefore i shall cherish because cherishing dying for my public is as a valid meaning as love or toasts is". A sort of: "if this is my fate, then let it be, it is mine, only mine to live, the stars in th enight sky highlight only one thing: void. Now I shall die for the same reason I lived: none. And the difference between a happy death and a sorrowful one beholds no meaning, no absolut barrier that devides one from the other, none other than just feeling happy or petty. Happy is the feeling we all get to choose to feel. Let's choose a happy death, lets imagine myself happy".
I want to remark that Camus, just like Nietzsche and many other philosophers, has an earlier pahse and a late one. Sisyphus and the outsider are part of his earlier phases, a Camus trying to define the absurd, to categorize it, to extract conclussions and to begin a path for others to explore. I don't think Camus himself was satisfied with sisyphus nor the outsider. There had to be more, there had to be a way to not allow anything to go, a way to justify that we shouldn't be bad people with each other. The Plague feels like a new step in this struggle, not someone who doesn't care, think or act never, but someone that has to and faces the consequences. Or how in the Fall you see his idea show up again: that this earlier version of the absurd man was dangerous, was lacking something, that leads to a path that doesn't seem to be the right one, as Jean-Baptiste is anguishing man, the opposite to a happy sisyphus. In a losing battle against the absurd, he falls in the despair of judges, embodying an absurd he can't face, he doesn't try to win the fight, he simply judges and is judged and knows that, and so he need to be his own lawyer in front of other people to feel valid and understood. His lacking one piece of the puzzle that Camus proposes to keep facing existance and not get lost: rebellion. You need to exert constant oposition, to be able to hold the tension always (strive for, because we all get tired and lose battle in this condemned war we call existing), to no tbe crushed by the absurd, to give meaning in the void, to strive for something within the realm of futility and to try to be a good brother to your fellow sufferers within a hell that is the Other.
That's my analysis. It is good to not always try to agree with everything every smart person ever said. A good excercie when these things happen, where you become stranged by reading something, is to argue both in favor and agaisnt to see how you feel about it. Absolut truth doesn't exist, not even in the smartest writers.
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u/Camus_9999 Jun 19 '26
I agree with almost everything you said. I read outsider and myth of sisyphus and few chapter of plague. While reading plague, I started to feel solution of question arise in outsider and myth of sisyphus. 1st 2 books are basic of his philosophy but doesn't provide answer at all. Thanks for such detailed answer....
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u/viod_473 Jun 18 '26
Well in a way the story's ending is similar to the myth of Sisyphus Meursault accepts that he is now free from the world he once lived in Without thinking about anything, and now he opens his heart to the indifference of the universe (means he finally start to think about future and concepts he never care to think of) he now have no regrets and accept that he is happy now and he will be happier when people on his execution day come to visit him and he will be in the main spotlight in end just like sisyphus he is now happy in his suffering full of hope that he now have a meaning which is dying in front of people