As Camus Quizzed Capital Punishment

Few lines in literature are as famous as the opening of Albert Camus's L'Étranger: "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I don't know." The most famous work by Camus—an editor, playwright, novelist, journalist and, although he denied it, a philosopher—was rightly considered as a new start for European fiction.

- SAAI SUDHARSAN SATHIYAMOORTHY

Few lines in literature are as famous as the opening of Albert Camus's L'Étranger: "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I don't know." The most famous work by Camus—an editor, playwright, novelist, journalist and, although he denied it, a philosopher—was rightly considered as a new start for European fiction. The stark tale of a pied noir, who kills an unnamed Arab and seems indifferent to his fate while facing execution, is a dense creation that deals with the themes of alienation, the crepuscular line between truth and lie, and capital punishment.

As the opening betrays, Meursault, the petit colon narrator, is distant even from the woman who bore him. He is engulfed with a weariness that a sociologist would categorize as anomie and the French call l'appel du vide (call of the void). He is inscrutable and intransigent even as he is imprisoned for murder. His is the strangeness of the forsaken, not the banality of someone excluded. He is condemned to death as he refuses to express any remorse for his crime. As Camus would later state, Meursault refuses to lie, which entails more than simply expressing something that is false. While we all do it every day to make life easier, Meursault refuses to disguise his emotions. He responds that he is annoyed rather than regretful, and that condemns him. He is left hoping for an indifferent crowd at his execution, only to be greeted with howls of execration.