Even though it has been a long time since my last post, I want to talk about the Stranger for a little while. Due to my preoccupation with the play and other duties I've been unable to sit down and write a post that really did justice to the complexity of this novel, but that doesn't mean I haven't been considering certain subjects intensely. Luckily for these ideas, I keep a small notepad on me whenever I can in order to catch fleeting ideas for later refinement. I would've hoped to have addressed these concepts when the book was more fresh in my mind, but, unfortunately, that was not the case. I'm optimistic though, that my opinions and stances on these subjects improve with age like a fine wine. But I've already wasted enough space on this babbling. On to the nitty-gritty.
After completing my panel presentation I became very focused on how people reacted to Parts 1 and 2 differently. When I talked to other students outside of class about it the near unanimous answer was that people found the first part engaging and the second part disturbing. Seeing an almost entirely undivided opinion first led me to think that the modern preference based in the books writing, but then I began to look at reviews and more scholarly opinions of the book as a whole. In this group, I saw a huge preference towards part 2, enough that some even recommended a complete disregard for the part 1 in order to focus on the trial itself. These approaches and interpretations do bear some merit as they focus on how society should judge the behavior displayed by Meursault, but I feel that in putting such a focus on the more judgment based section a reader might miss the most rewarding and beneficial part of the novel.
As I started the trial in part 2 of the stranger I was struck by a strange sense of literary deja-vu. I had read a book that had a structure of almost uncanny similarity in last year's African-American Literature class. The first two sections of Native Son is the story of a poverty stricken black youth named Bigger who through a series of events comes to kill a young white girl and his black girlfriend. The third and densest part of the book concerns his trial which brings forth questions as to whether Bigger is truly "guilty" or if it is more the fault of the society and ideas that surround him. Sound familiar yet? I found here that, similarly to my reaction to Camus, I preferred the sections that focused on the life and interactions of the main character rather than the trial which reflects on the implications of said actions.
The reason I preferred the beginnings of these books is that it allows you to understand and judge the characters in a much more subtle way. You see how they interact with others and become slightly unsettled when they react strangely to societal norms. Most importantly, the author endears you to the characters in subtle ways by allowing you to connect with them in a way no one else can. You see into their minds and observe how they act when nobody else is around to judge or impact them, when they are able to confront their own anxieties and troubles without interference. By doing this, the authors make us more invested in the discussion of their morality and role in society. The reason we all seem to find the trial to be a disturbing and uncompromising setting is that the judge and the jury are looking at these men from the outside, while we are horrified from within. To them these men are a problem to be fixed, but for us it is a much more important problem. We want to see the story work out for the main characters. We want them to have some sort of redemption in which they change their ways and learn to live in their societies. The reason for this is that the authors took the time to make us care and learn about the human sides of what some would call monsters. Although it may be interesting to observe Meursault without these biases I feel that the connections forged in the first part are essential to engaging the reader and causing them to truly care about the issues put forth in the second part.
1 comment:
Yes indeed--book 3 of _Native Son_ and part 2 of _The Stranger_ share a number of striking similarities--they compel the reader to contemplate the meaning of what they've just read. And if you look again, the ending of Wright's novel engages many of the same existential issues as Camus does--and Wright's came first (1940 to _L'Etranger's_ 1942). Bigger confronts the sense that his life has been meaningless, and he too is impatient and hostile to the reverend/clergyman who attempts to console him and save his soul. He ends up embracing his own life as he has lived it, regretting nothing, and confronting the fact of his execution with courage and a spirit of resistance.
I'm with you in preferring reading the "action" parts of these novels to the more ponderous prison sections--this may be in part because it's no fun to even try to imagine imprisonment, let alone death row. There's a tedium deliberately built into the narrative. But for both I insist that these closing parts--AFTER the trial, where society has rendered its judgment--are absolutely essential, not as entertaining narrative but as necessary philosophical contemplation of the novels' central themes.
I've come across a handful of essays that discuss Wright and Camus side by side, and I've in fact taught these novels together, years ago, in a college course entitled Crime and Punishment in the Twentieth Century. Man, that syllabus had a BUNCH of depressing prison narratives!
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