A Happy Death

“We all fall on top of each other. There were so many dead and wounded that you could have rowed a boat across the blood in that gully.”

In the restaurant, Emmanuel shares an old war story. The tone and pattern of his speech are identical to the boastful anecdotes told by the other men. This traumatic memory of intense and extreme violence is just another tale told over lunch, illustrating the extent to which the men in the story have become desensitized to violence.

“His entire life lay in the yellowed image the mirror offered of a room where the filthy oil lamp stood among the bread crusts.”

Mersault perceives his life to be a muddied reflection in a filthy mirror. His life is not whole or satisfying. Instead, it is barely present. He is not a person, but a reflection in a mirror, an echo of someone who might truly be alive but is unable to recognize himself. Mersault has nothing that makes real life worth living, so he studies the muddy reflection instead.

“People don’t love each other at our age, Marthe—they please each other, that’s all.”

Mersault dismisses Marthe’s question about love with a vague allusion to a philosophical idea. He has no way to back up his ideas beyond his own experiences, illustrating the way in which he projects his angst onto the world around him. Mersault may not be capable of love, and he needs to believe that this is a problem shared by other people, rather than an issue limited to himself.

“Besides, the pent-up passion, the intense life animating this absurd stump of a man, was enough to attract Mersault, to produce in him something which, if he had been a little less guarded, he might have taken for friendship.”

The novel begins with Mersault murdering Zagreus and then, two chapters later, hints that the two men might have been friends in other circumstances. The motivation for the murder is slowly becoming clear. Mersault’s withdrawal and isolation are so extreme that a murder seems as logical an outcome to him as a friendship.

“We don’t have time to be ourselves. We only have time to be happy.”

To Zagreus, being happy and being oneself are two different and incompatible ideas. There is not enough time to be both; a person must choose between truly understanding themselves or feeling joy. To be oneself is to be unhappy and to be unhappy means abandoning the introspection and reflection necessary for true self-actualization. The above lines are simple and declarative, underscoring Zagreus’s point. The repetition of “We” at the beginning of each sentence creates emphasis.

“Happy nations have no history.”

In Zagreus’s reasoning, happiness is incompatible with an understanding of the self. This extends beyond individuals. For a country to be happy, it cannot have a history because a history is a socially accepted version of national identity, and means confronting the violence of its past. The only way to be happy, for either a country or person, is to be freed from the shackles of history and to live as a blank slate.

“Mersault offered Cardona a cigarette, and both men smoked without speaking.”

Mersault is not an emotional man. He pities Cardona but from a distance, and chooses not to engage with him on an emotional level. Rather than advice or comfort, all he can offer is a cigarette. This small gesture is as close as Mersault can come to offering his sympathies and foreshadows his desire to help Zagreus through what he sees as a similarly practical gesture, killing him.

“He paid out of sheer reluctance to argue.”

After killing Zagreus, Mersault has already begun to follow Zagreus’s lessons. Zagreus taught Mersault that knowing oneself and being happy are incompatible, but that money is a direct route to happiness. He is armed with Zagreus’s money and uses it to avoid an argument with a porter which might otherwise have made him miserable.

“A moment later Mersault realized he had been running and was now in the square of the old town hall.”

Mersault does not understand himself to the point where he doesn’t even realize that he was running. This is symbolic: It shows how quickly he has been passing through the world without understanding the motivations or ramifications of his actions. He arrives in an empty square in front of a town hall, a symbol of a hollow community and the extent to which Mersault is alone in a society that has passed him by.

“Suddenly the odor, which he had forgotten, was all around him.”

In Prague, Mersault sees a badly injured man. The smell of blood and the sight of the man’s wounds remind him of what he has done. Mersault now has a large sum of money and the opportunity to live out his wildest fantasies, but he cannot be happy. He knows what he has done, and is haunted by the price he has paid to be where he is. Zagreus stays with him, even during his feverish experiences in Prague.

“He looked again at his hands, which lay like live, wild animals on his knees: the left one long and supple, the right thicker, muscular. He knew them, recognized them, yet they were distinct from himself, as though capable of actions in which his will had no part.”

Mersault’s alienation is deepening as he rides the train away from Prague. In Prague, he found that he was losing his sense of himself and felt the need to return to a more familiar place. His unfamiliarity with the world extends to his body, to the point where his own limbs seem like strangers to him. Mersault has talked about the inability to know oneself and to be happy at the same time, but in this moment, he neither knows himself nor feels happy. He is losing everything. Camus uses a simile, where something is compared to something else using “like” or “as,” to characterize Mersault’s hands. They are feral, “like wild animals on his knees […]”

“Tell me about yourselves and describe the sun to a miserable wretch who has no roots anywhere and who remains your faithful Patrice Mersault.”

Mersault writes to his female friends in an act of desperation. Despite his joking, sardonic tone, he feels lonely and unfamiliar with himself. He asks the women to tell him about themselves as he hopes to vicariously experience an act of self-identity. In describing themselves, the women may assert a knowledge and self-awareness that he lacks and envies. His joking comments about himself contain an element of truthfulness. The murder has left him feeling alone, self-loathing, and without roots. By reaching out to people he knows, he is hoping to reconnect with the world and with himself.

“He recognized in himself that power to forget which only children have, and geniuses, and the innocent.”

Movement and travel help Mersault to forget himself. His regrets and mistakes are less obvious to him when he is physically moving, to the point where standing still makes him agitated. While returning to Algiers, he realizes that he has not thought about killing Zagreus for several days. He frames his forgetfulness as a powerful new tool, one which is only available to children, geniuses, and innocent people. Mersault decides that he must fit into the innocent category, even though his guilty mind is only satiated by movement. Once he stops moving, the power to forget will soon desert him.

“A lovely creature is not entitled to grow ugly.”

Mersault stays with the three women in the house above the world. When speaking about cats, he tells Claire the above line. The comment belies Mersault’s own self-loathing. He does not see himself as a “lovely creature,“ but he believes those around him are. If they were to grow “ugly,” then he would not be able to bask in their beauty as a way to hide. He does not want to entertain thoughts of a world turning as ugly as he believes himself to be.

“At this time of day the mail plane passes over the city, bearing the glory of its glittering metal over land and through the heavens.”

The mail plane is a distant symbol for the way in which the house above the world is cut off from everything. The plane passes far above to the point where it is almost in the heavens. To the people in the house, it is unreachable and unknowable. Social interactions and bureaucracy are as alien to the carefree residents of the house as society itself. They are completely cut off from the world, which is now a speck on the horizon.

“Patrice, Catherine, Rose, and Claire then grew aware of the happiness born of their abandonment to the world.”

The people in the house have abandoned the world in an effort to make themselves happy. Their pursuit of happiness is in danger of consuming them, and the darkness of their reality occasionally breaks through. They are living relentlessly in the moment, unmooring themselves from society as a way to avoid any consequences for their actions. They justify their abandonment as a way to avoid introspection.

“Only an airplane permits a man a more apparent solitude than the kind he discovers in an automobile.”

Mersault needs movement to keep his mind occupied. When he is still, he becomes ravaged by guilt. The solitude that he believes he craves is actually freedom from introspection, which he feels whenever he is moving. A car and an airplane provide him with the greatest amount of movement and thus the greatest amount of freedom. He loves to travel, but only as a means of escaping himself.

“His days were organized according to a rhythm whose deliberation and strangeness became as necessary to him as had been his office, his restaurant, and his sleep in his mother’s room.”

At his small house, Mersault finds a way to instill routine. As in Algiers, his routine is a familiar pattern of movement that allows him to distract himself from his most cloying thoughts. However, the routine does not make him happy. Instead, it simply allows him to forget his unhappiness. The rhythm of routine and movement allows Mersault to fool himself.

“Thus he became one with a life in its pure state, he rediscovered paradise given only to the most private or the most intelligent animals.”

Mersault craves an animal-like paradise because animals are not plagued by guilt or shame in the same way that he is. Mersault is pleased to have found himself such a place that provides physical pleasure and a distraction from his alienation.

“In the innocence of his heart, Mersault accepted this green sky and this love-soaked earth with the same thrill of passion and desire as when he killed Zagreus in the innocence of his heart.”

The repetition of the phrase “The innocence of his heart” is Mersault affecting the narration, insisting upon the idea so that it becomes a reality (63). As he unknowingly approaches the end of his life, he desperately wants to assure himself of his innocence.

“Never had a spring touched him so deeply.”

Traditionally, spring is a season of rebirth. Mersault desperately wants to feel the touch of spring because he needs a moral and physical rebirth. Still haunted by the death of Zagreus and feeling his body begin to fail, Mersault looks to spring to inspire rejuvenation.

“His body, which had just now carried him to the limits of joy, plunged him into a suffering that gripped his bowels, making him close his eyes.”

Mersault is being betrayed by his own body. As in the aftermath of Zagreus’s death, when he became alienated from his own limbs, Mersault tries to justify a pain he cannot explain. His alienation has become so severe and his experience of delusions so intense that he can no longer lay claim to an authority over his own physical self.

“He was overcome by a violent and fraternal love for this man from whom he had felt so distant, and he realizes that by killing him he had consummated a union which bound them together forever.”

Mersault, once jealous that Zagreus had a relationship with Marthe, is now bound to Zagreus in a way that Marthe and Zagreus could never be. Mersault feels that he and Zagreus have achieved a union that goes far beyond the romantic. They share a connection that is tragic, terrifying, and almost incomprehensible.