The Stranger Trial

The whole time when I was reading the novel, up to this point that is, I really dislike Meursault. I thought he was a crazy psychopath that didn't care one little bit about anyone. And then, I read the chapters on his trial. All of a sudden, it was like Camus was just completely manipulating my emotions. I wanted to defend the killer! The prosecutor had it all wrong! Meursault was not a conniving mastermind, just a guy who made some bad choices and was susceptible to heatstroke! But wait, hold on. In my mind I knew he was guilty, and that he deserved to be punished. That he had killed an innocent man for no reason at all. And yet, I was suddenly on his side. How scary is it, that the words of this author can suddenly make you pity a murderer? Can make you want him to get off? Is that normal? It certainly freaked me out. I much prefer having a fixed opinion and knowing exactly where people's personalities fit into my picture of them. But this just through me for a loop. It was not only Camus manipulating the trial to make Meursault appear as the victim, but it was like he really was the victim. Everyone was ganging up on the poor little man who had an accident, and judging him for it--life or death. One mistake, and he has to die because that's the way the justice system worked. Of course, it didn't help at all that he had no idea that he could lie or manipulate the events to make himself seem more innocent, in fact it never even crossed his mind (at least as far as the he as the narrator tells.) In this sense, he does give himself a bit of dignity. That may not be the way he saw it though, as he never made a conscious choice to do the honest thing. However, this contradicts my next point.

After Meursault kills the Arab man, he essentially gets a blast of humanity. It takes a while for him to come to realize it, but he is gradually getting more of an idea of what "normal" people feel. He feels sad that he ruined his day immediately, but doesn't yet feel guilty. However, after he fired the first shot the first active voice comes into play. "I shot him," he says. Later, in his trial, though he does not feel the human fear from the threat of death, or any human sense of self-preservation, he feels the need to cry because he realizes that everyone in the court room, even the defense lawyer, hates his guts. He feels real anger when he tries to throttle the chaplain, real fear when he shivers uncontrollably because he realizes he can't know when his appeal is, and real resignation from his impending death. (Five Stages of Grief seems appropriate here: denial, fear, anger, something else, acceptance, right? That, at least, if nothing else, is human!) He comes to realize that he actually enjoys life. Killing someone because of a temporary meltdown was the most human thing he did in the entire novel.

One could almost argue that in the trial, the fact that Meursault is able to conquer his innate self-preservation instincts and ultimately do the right thing by telling the truth does make him almost like a superior human in kind of a sick way. He gets away from his animal instincts. Though, of course, "more evolved" does not necessarily make him superior. I am just trying to present a case for him in which his neutral seemingly cold personality makes improves him. I guess Camus succeeded in his experiment to find out whether or not readers could feel sorry for murderers if he worded it in the right way. I want to try and get out of his little trap though, and not agree with this argument, because
no matter how the situation is abruptly turned around, Meursault did murder a man.