Albert Camus's The Stranger

Meursault, an alien not of France or Algeria but of the world, shot the Arab and after the man had fallen, pumped four more bullets into the body. The sun made him do it just as if El Nino toppled the financial markets and urge disgruntle employees to shoot their colleagues and managers. He showed the same nonchalance toward a possible promotion, his mother’s death, his making love with Marie the first time, his neighbor Salamano’s beating the dog, and his friend Raymond’s beating his wife as toward killing the Arab. During the trial, contrary the social convention he offered no convincing motive and refused to defend himself against he crime.

To prevent him from contaminating society, from spreading meaninglessness and detachment to others, the jury found him guilty of callousness and condemned him to death for being a stranger to his mother, his lover, his friends, moral codes, social norms, and cultural conventions.

Arzew, Algeria

For the generation after WWII, for the survivors after the stench of Hitler and Stalin and the taste of Aushwitz, Nanjing and Hiroshima, what could be more seductive than embracing absurdity and thrashing humanity?

Nineteenth century optimism had crashed into a stonewall; utopia had metamorphosed into the Holocaust; the unlimited possibilities of reason, science and humanity had created the machine guns, the gas chambers, and the atomic bombs. Stranger, welcome to the brave new world!

The Guillotine

Just as a starving child would ignore Zeno’s problem or Fermat’s Last Theorem, so a stranger would neglect the alien faces and tunes, desiring to smell his home soil, to shake his kinsmen’s hands and to hug his "ground of being." In an absurd world, moral, social and cultural contracts would appear frivolous and irrelevant, and those who had feasted upon absurdity may view the world with a different pair of colored glasses and appreciate the Meursault’s methodic actions and orderly world.

When you are among lunatics accusing you of being insane, can you maintain your sanity? What is absurdity but a relative evaluation based on preconceived and accepted norms. Who really is the stranger in the world, Meursault or Marie or the prosecutor or the magistrate or the chaplain?

Albert Camus

In The Stranger, a must-read to understand one view of the human predicament, Camus depicted the post-modern mileau where the Holocaust had dethroned and demythologized reason and science and the mutual critique among various claims to truth and meaning¾religion, politics, science, etc¾would result in a pluralism of absurdities that would provide new insights to humanity.

Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground: Confession of a Madman

The memorable words “I am a sick man. I am a wicked man. I am an unattractive man” introduces us to the bitter and misanthropic narrator of Notes from the Underground. Through this underground man, Dostoyevsky warns against the influence of western enlightened thoughts on Russia. The unreliable narrator, a veteran of the Russian civil service, through his distorted ramblings, criticizes logic and reason and enlightened self-interest. This reflects Dostoyevsky's turning away from such ideas after his arrest and imprisonment in Siberia. For the underground man, freewill will triumph over determinism as dictated by logic and reason. And a person will act illogically just to show that she is human and she has a choice.

When an officer moves him out of the way, the underground man becomes a non-being, an object in the path, which is confirmed when he later confronts the officer and the latter doesn't recall what happened. In the eyes of his friends, he is also nobody. They changed the time of the farewell party for one of them but doesn't tell the underground man. And later when the underground man looks for them in a brothel, they have retired with the prostitutes and again he realizes he is a nonentity. Even when he tries to be a hero to the prostitute Liza, he ends up mistreating her and invalidating his own existence.

St. Petersburg (Photo: Graham from London, UK)

The underground man believes he is miserable because he is intelligent and well-read.  He can appreciate beauty, but his reason and knowledge show how unprofitable it is to cling onto such outdated ideals, ideals contrary to logic and maximum utility. He despises utilitarianism but after understanding it, can't get rid of it. Like after being infested by the plague, he will have suffer it until death.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

During the second half of the nineteenth century, most of Europe was worshiping reason and science and so Dostoyevsky seemed like a madman calling out from the wilderness. But today we have seen how reason and science can fail us and we can appreciate Dostoyevsky's warning though it would be as foolish to abandon reason and science and return to pre-modern society. We have moved beyond either/or and in the post-modern world we must grapple with the dialogue between romanticism and utilitarianism, between truth and beauty, between faith and reason, between the individual and the community. Pluralism but not total relativism.

Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

In his trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett explores the frailty of existence.

In the first novel, the unreliable narrator recounts his decline but through the monologue, the reader learns not so much his past as declining state of mind. From his phrases and sentences, we realize how far he has departed from reality and how little we can trust his words. And even Molloy couldn't trust his recollection of events and his perception of world. In the second part of the first novel, the narrator Moran, a private detective searching for Molloy, follows a similar decline into delusion and his world becomes as unreal as Molloy's. As if they are the same person.

In Malone Dies, an old man confined to an asylum recounts his story and that of a boy named Sapo. But here, as in Molloy, the unreliable narrator conveys not so much the events as his delusion and decline. And we see Malone's death on the last page of the novel through the paragraphs and sentences distorting into fragments to reflect the narrator's last thoughts.

Samuel Beckett

“Lemuel is in charge, he raises his hatchet on which the blood will never dry, but not to hit anyone, he will not hit anyone, he will not hit anyone any more, he will not touch anyone any more, either with it or with it or with it or with or
or with it or with his hammer or with his stick or with his fist or in thought in dream I mean never he will never
or with his pencil or with his stick or
or light light I mean
never there he will never
never anything
there
any more ” from Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies.

Beckett's Birthplace: Foxrock, Ireland (Photo by Sarah777)

In The Unnamable, the narrator asks " What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do, in my situation, how proceed?" As if only a nameless person, perhaps a nonexistent person, can seek to act and to live. The narrator claims to have created Molloy, Malone and other characters in Samuel Beckett's novels, and like them, he also struggles to communicate reality and follows the same path toward non-existence.

Beckett's trilogy is a postmodern fiction, not a meta-fiction but a story where the plot collapses and character and, even more so, style dominates. Through the narrators' babbling and occasional insight, through the fragmented thoughts and distorted sentences, we learn about their psyche, isolated and delusional. And we realize Beckett is describing postmodern men and women.