Light In Camus's The Stranger

Finding Enlightenment in the Dark: An analysis of light in Camus’s The Stranger

In The Stranger, the protagonist Mersault becomes ostracized from his society due to his emotional separation and unwillingness to play by societal rules. His continual apathy and expression that everything “didn’t matter” eventually leads to his death sentence (8). Mersault focuses on his physical surroundings, commenting on the light and the heat around him. He perceives the world through his senses, not through his emotions. Though in conventional literature light is representative of a higher power or enlightenment, The Stranger uses light in a confusing, suffocating sense. The unusual use of light leads to Mersault’s ironic enlightenment in the darkness of

This calming diction shows that Mersault is experiencing a different kind of emotional release; not one of anger but of acceptance. After all of the instances where the light was overwhelming to Mersault, he finds peace in the darkness. He is able to recognize truth. For the first time, “I felt as if I understood,” not only the imminence of death, but the intentions of his mother (122). Mersault feels a human connection: a novel idea after all of his experiences with Raymond, Salamano, and Marie. Therefore, as Mersault faces death, he “opened [him]self to the gentle indifference of the world” (122). He recognizes that man has no control over his fate: he would still be facing the “dark wind” (122) whether or not “the sentence had been read at eight o’clock at night and not at five o’clock” (109). Thus, in the face of death, Mersault reaches his enlightened state. There is no meaning in life: the universe is indifferent to the actions of mankind. Meaning is arbitrarily ascribed by individuals, such as the lawyers and jury who found it gravely repulsive that Mersault did not cry at his mother’s funeral. Though he spent his whole live denouncing arbitrary meaning in life, in the moments before his death, Mersault begs for human connection and empathy. He wishes for his death to have meaning, and for others to create that meaning with “cries of hate”