41 pages • 1 hour read
Albert CamusA Happy Death
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1971A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Conscious Death”
Part 2, Chapter 1 Summary
Mersault finds a filthy hotel room in Prague. After a short sleep, he walks “aimlessly” around the room and feels an absurd delight at his sudden sense of solitude and freedom. An angry, elderly porter brings his bags; Mersault pays the man rather than argue. Exiting the hotel, he explores the streets while looking like “some restless animal” (32). He sits in a church then searches for a “cheap restaurant,” and then sits in a bar and eats a small amount while staring at the strange crowds. After, he passes through Prague’s Jewish quarter. Feeling weak, still suffering from the effects of the fever, he vomits in the street and returns to his hotel.
The next day is overcast. Mersault resolves to plan his sightseeing activities in a more methodical manner, so as to avoid “crises like the one yesterday” (34). He explores the city while trying to retain control of his body, feeling “bitterly conscious of his desolation: a solitude in which love had no part” (35). After four days in Prague, he still hasn’t bought the comb necessary to tame his wild hair. He continues to feel as though something is “missing” as he wanders the same streets and sees the same, strange characters. He is haunted by the image of Zagreus’s dead body and feels a sudden nostalgia for warmer cities and women.
Part 2, Chapter 2 Summary
Mersault leaves Prague in the middle of the night. He spends two days on the train, watching through the window and “contemplating his freedom” (37). The movement of the train across Europe comforts him. He visits Breslau and then Vienna, which he decides is a “refreshing city.” He writes a letter to his female friends, and they respond, inviting him to their house in Algiers.
Mersault travels back to Algiers via Genoa. After several days in the Italian city, he appreciates the warmth of the sun and the prospect of returning to a place he knows. He feels “thirsty, hungry for love, eager for pleasure” (40). While crossing to Algiers, he begins to feel as though he has “returned to himself” (40). Reflecting on his mistakes and his relationship with Marthe, he feels a “furious passion to live” (41). He realizes that he has not thought about Zagreus since Vienna and hopes that he now has the power to forget.
Part 2, Chapter 3 Summary
Mersault moves into a house in Algiers with three women: Catherine, Rose, and Claire. The house is on top of a hill, as though it is “above the world” (42). They sunbathe, talk, and host dinner parties, describing their home as a “house of happiness” (43).
During one dinner party, Claire cooks while the others talk to the guests, Elaine and Noel. They drink, eat, and talk into the night about “the patriarchal truth of a concrete and sensuous life” (46). Around them, a number of cats lounge in the house, coming and going as they please. Mersault thinks about his recent romantic experience with a woman named Lucienne Raynal. They walked together in “mysterious harmony.” Each evening in the house ends “on the terrace under the star-studded night” (48). The inhabitants become aware of their “happiness born of their abandonment to the world” (49).
Part 2, Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Throughout A Happy Death, the protagonist is referred to variously as Patrice and Mersault. The choice of names is a subtle indicator of Mersault’s emotional state at any given moment. When he is in the house above the world, he is surrounded by friends whose only aim is to pursue happiness. Mersault wants to believe that he is involved in this pursuit and has few worries. As a result, he becomes Patrice.
The happiness cannot last forever, though. Mersault soon finds himself dissatisfied with this decadent form of existence and drives himself back into isolation. When in Central Europe or returning to Algiers, Mersault returns to being Mersault. He cannot escape his past, just as he cannot escape the reality of his name. Everyone in Algiers knows him as Mersault; the only name he knows himself as. For Mersault, Mersault is the only true identity, and it is an identity associated with alienation and trauma.
As Zagreus suggested before his death, Happiness and Self-Understanding Are Incompatible. By switching to Patrice, Mersault has tried to alter his understanding of himself to pursue happiness. Because he knows himself too well, and that he is truly Mersault, his attempts fail. The alteration between Patrice and Mersault is a subtle vindication for Zagreus’s theory that one who understands themselves can’t be happy, at least to the extent that Mersault has internalized this idea by trying to become someone else.
Mersault’s future is a blank slate on which he can write anything. He has plenty of Zagreus’s money and all indications suggest that he has completely gotten away with murder. As free as he wants to feel, however, he cannot bring himself to enjoy his new life. The time he spends in Prague is a tortured, dreamlike manifestation of the guilt he feels for killing a man. Everywhere he looks, he is reminded of Zagreus’s dead body and the part he played in making the body look that way.
The passive observer who once sat on the balcony and watched the world go by must reckon with how he impacted another human. He is haunted by this, and the trip from Prague to Vienna to Genoa is a regretful acceptance of Mersault’s role in society. He knows that he cannot escape, even with plenty of money. His guilt manifests in subtle ways; despite the fortune in his suitcase, he checks himself into squalid hotels. When he visits a sex worker, he leaves her a large tip because he believes that she deserves the money more than he does. Mersault has money, but he refuses to spend it on anything which might make him happy. The money is tainted by the way in which it came into his possession. Mersault learns that there is no such thing as a blank slate in a society where every person, act, and emotion has intersecting consequences.
The house above the world is not just a reference to the building’s location on a hillside. It alludes to the way in which the inhabitants physically remove themselves from a tainted world with nothing to offer. Together with three women, Mersault devotes his life to pursuing happiness through isolation. The quartet has cut themselves off from the rest of Algiers and society.
Life in the house sounds easy: It is a mix of philosophical debates, the petting of cats, and dinner parties. Each night ends with the inhabitants staring up at the stars. Rather than make Mersault happy, however, his time in the house only reminds him of his small place in the universe. While staring up at the stars or at the mail plane that passes overhead, Mersault is forced to reckon with his role in the world. He is an inconsequential man in a massive universe.
Despite the inconsequential nature of his life, he is still haunted by his actions. One murder has traumatized him and nothing he does can ameliorate his alienation from society. The house above the world does not help Mersault pursue happiness. Rather, it reminds him of The Futility of Living in an Indifferent World.
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By Albert Camus
