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 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Conscious Death”
Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary
Mersault drives along the coast in the early morning. He announced his departure from the house above the world a month ago but returned a short time later feeling “a dim exhaustion” (50). Having invested his money in German pharmaceuticals, he now plans to retire to a small home in the Chenoua. He married Lucienne Raynal and recommended that she keep her apartment in Algiers; he will occasionally send for her to join him. He remembers telling Catherine about his plans to leave; he explained that he feared “the risk of being loved” (51), which will not allow him to be happy.
Mersault moves to the Chenoua and begins to “set up his house, organize his life” (52). He quickly becomes tired and forgets why he moved to the small town. He lives “sociably enough” but becomes bored and reflective, so writes to Lucienne to tell her to join him. Her presence helps him escape his dread, but he soon becomes bored with her. As soon as he realizes this, she asks to move to the house. Mersault refuses, telling her that the only function of love is that “it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from” (54).
She leaves and, when he feels bored, Mersault returns to Algiers. While waiting to reunite with the people from the house above the world, he visits his old apartment. It is now rented out to a café manager. Seeing old acquaintances again makes him briefly happy, though he feels “as alien and remote to them as an uninhabited planet” (54). He runs into Marthe. They walk together, and he begins to see her in a new light. She bears no ill will against him and hopes that they may see each other again.
Seeking out Lucienne, Mersault stays with her for a night and then walks the streets with her the next day. Then, he returns to the Chenoua alone, feeling “an enormous silence in himself” (55). In the small town, he settles into a dull routine of walks and “conscious hygiene.” He swims each day and plays pool with a fisherman named Perez who has one arm. After, he and Perez eat a silent lunch, and occasionally Mersault helps Perez fish. This routine helps Mersault to rediscover “paradise given only to the most private or the most intelligent animals” (57).
Mersault meets a doctor named Bernard who introduces him to other people in the village. Mersault learns about a local historical dispute between “two rich Spanish landowners who a series of speculations had transformed into millionaires” (58). Bernard introduces Mersault to one of these men.
Some time later, Lucienne visits him. Then, he is joined by Claire, Rose, and Catherine. They spend the day in “silent harmony” and decide to hike up a nearby mountain. During the hike, Mersault faints. He is taken home, and Bernard treats him. Mersault decides to “tell [Bernard] everything” (61). As they talk, Mersault asks Bernard whether he is “capable of feeling contempt for a man” (62). Bernard says yes, in certain conditions. He leaves Mersault alone. Mersault reflects on Bernard’s statement that he could only hate someone who acted out of expediency or desire for money. He wonders whether his crimes fit this description. He decides to tell Bernard nothing.
The next day, his guests leave him alone. He walks through the garden and realizes that the warm seasons are ending and that soon “a long winter” will begin (63).
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary
Mersault studies the changing seasons. He is increasingly affected by a serious illness. He walks along the cliff edges and beaches, reflecting on the recent experiences of his life. Desiring “a relationship with the world” (65), he swims out into the warm sea. He swims out as far as he can, until a cold current exhausts him and he labors back to the beach.
On the beach, he dresses and begins to feel faint. He feels an intense pain and notices the pinkness of his nails as he climbs into bed. Coughing, he tastes blood and feels a sudden chill grip his whole body. He does not want to die “like a sick man” (66). He is determined to survive, though he is haunted by images of Zagreus’s face. In a chair by his window, he watches the dawn and sinks into a deep, confused sleep.
Mersault wakes and remembers that Lucienne is scheduled to visit. He feels sick and exhausted and sends for Bernard, who diagnoses his condition as “bad.” Mersault’s heart is failing, Bernard explains. Since Mersault does not want to die in a coma, Bernard gives him a capsule of adrenaline to swallow if he feels weak.
Passing Lucienne on the way out, Bernard warns her to leave Mersault alone and assures her that he is not too sick. Mersault slips in and out of short comas, using the adrenaline when he can. He watches Perez’s fishing boat out on the water. As night falls, he sees feverish visions of Zagreus’s face. He assures himself that other people have simply “not lived enough” (68).
Slipping in and out of consciousness, he realizes that he and Zagreus share an unbreakable bond. Though he has found some degree of happiness, he realizes that he has become alienated from his own dying body which is now ready “to leave Mersault, to restore him to the world” (69). He insists to himself that he must have his eyes open when he dies. As dawn approaches, he lays back in his bed and feels himself return to “the truth of the motionless worlds” (69). Mersault dies in Lucienne’s arms.
Part 2, Chapters 4-5 Analysis
A Happy Death illustrates the expression: “Wherever you go, there you are.” Mersault changes locations, but he can’t escape himself. He tries to cavort lavishly across Central Europe but finds himself haunted by the ghosts of his past. He tries to live hedonistically in a house elevated above the rest of Algiers and dedicate himself to pursuing happiness, but he knows himself too well to stay around for long.
On his third attempt to flee himself, it seems he might succeed. The isolated house in the small town in the Chenoua is a chance to start over. The first thing he does is furnish the house and organize his life, building an existence that better reflects his desired mental state. In this place, Mersault can integrate into the local community. He can fish with an old man or pass the time talking aimlessly with Perez. With so few people knowing him in the Chenoua, he can rewrite his entire identity from scratch in the hope that he makes himself into someone he likes better or—at the very least—someone he can tolerate. The house in the Chenoua is a last chance to reimagine himself and to escape alienation in a place physically and socially removed from everything he has ever known.
He dictates the terms of his self-imposed isolation. He tells his wife not to visit him unless instructed, and his friends only come when he has already set up his life. Their visits are brief and by invitation only; Mersault wants only a tepid engagement with society. The fact that he is engaging at all hints at the impossibility of leaving his life behind or divorcing from society completely. His task of reinvention is so huge that he does not know how to operate without social links to his past. His wife and friends visiting makes him feel better because they are only visiting when he requests. Their presence, at his behest, makes him feel as though he has some degree of control over his life and how he interacts with the world.
Having a wife on demand inverts traditional social relations, and is part of Mersault’s attempt to combat the alienation that he has felt for his entire life. Mersault has failed to undo his alienation by traveling across Europe or by living with his friends. Instead, he arranges his life in such a way that he can deliberately alienate himself for most of the time, but invite his wife or friends to his house whenever he feels too alienated. He is desperate to believe that this self-serving arrangement will resolve all his problems. However, the emotional pain that he tries to hide from himself turns into a physical pain, and soon he becomes sick.
Mersault cannot escape himself. His physical problems coincide with the times he tries to alleviate his social alienation with companionship. Mersault first becomes sick when he is visited by friends. He collapses while on a hike. Months later, he falls sick again on the eve of Lucienne’s visit. The way in which his physical sickness manifests at such moments suggests that his attempts to trick himself into feeling unalienated are not working. He is simply hiding the pain while it metastasizes inside him.
Mersault’s sickness is a physical extension of the emotional pain that he has been unable to address for so long. His heart is failing and is unhealable, just like his guilt. Nothing Mersault can do will be able to stop the physical or emotional sickness—by this point in the novel, all remedies are futile. He simply knows himself too well to change and be happy, just as Zagreus warned him.
Instead, Mersault accepts his fate. Rather than continue to lie to himself, he asks Bernard for medicine which will allow him to remain awake at the moment of his death. He chooses a conscious death, one in which he is aware of his failures and limitations. The adrenaline given to Mersault is a metaphor for his acceptance of his fate. He is staring at his death and failure with open eyes, refusing to sink into the alienated coma that has defined so much of his life.
Mersault dies at the precise moment when he fully acknowledges his failures. The irony of his acceptance is that it comes too late to alleviate his alienation or his misery. Only in his final moments is Mersault able to fully accept his own reality.
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