The Outsider (7 page)

His last reflections, as he falls asleep on the eve of his execution, bring him a sort of insight:

With death so near, mother must have felt like someone on the brink of freedom, ready to start life again.... And I too felt ready to start life again. It was as if this great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky. ... I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the univer
se. To feel it so like myself…
made me realize I had been happy, that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that, on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators, and that they should greet me with howls of execration.
⁷

The last pages of the novel have revealed Meursault
’
s secret; the reason for his indifference is
his sense of unreality.
All his life he has lived with the same sense as Roquentin:
All this is unreal.
But the sense of unreality doesn
’
t torment him, as it tormented the Outsiders of our first chapter. He accepts life; sunlight, food, girls
’
bodies; he also accepts the unreality. It is the trial that pulls him up,
‘
with a brutal thunderclap of Halt
’
(Wells
’
s phrase). The prospect of death has
wakened him up,
thereby serving the same function as Roquentin
’
s nausea. It has, admittedly, wakened him up too late as far as he is concerned. But at least it has given him a notion of the meaning of freedom. Freedom is release from unreality.
‘
I had been happy and I was happy stil
¹
’
, but where is the point in being happy if the happiness is hidden from the consciousness by a heavy grime of unreality?

Sartre
’
s later formulation of Meursault
’
s realization is:
‘
Freedom is terror.
’
He observes, in his
Confederation de la Silence,
that it was during the war, working in the Underground resistance, in constant danger of betrayal and death, that he felt most free and alive. Obviously, freedom is not simply being allowed to do what you like; it is
intensity of willy
and it appears under any circumstances that limit man and arouse his will to more life.

The reader cannot fail to be struck by the similarity between Camus
’
s work and Franz Kafka
’
s. In Kafka, the sense of unreality is conveyed by deliberately using a dream-technique. In
The Metamorphosis
the hero awakens one morning to find himself changed into a gigantic beetle; in
The Trial
he is arrested and finally executed without knowing why. Destiny seems to have struck with the question: If you think life is unreal, how about
this?
Its imperative seems to be: Claim your freedom,
or else
... For the men who fail to claim their freedom there is the sudden catastrophe, the nausea, the trial and execution, the slipping to a lower form of life. Kafka
’
s
Metamorphosis
would be a perfectly commonsense parable to a Tibetan Buddhist.

Camus
’
s
L’Etranger
reminds us of another modern writer who has dealt with the problem of freedom, Ernest Hemingway. The parallel that
L’Etranger
brings to mind is the short story
‘
Soldier
’
s Home
’
, but comparison of the two makes it apparent that all of Hemingway
’
s work has its relevance to the problem of the Existentialist Outsider. Hemingway
’
s contribution is worth examining at length at this point.

‘
Soldier
’
s Home
’
deals with an American soldier who was returned from the war some time in late 1919. Krebs had been to a Methodist college before he joined up; when he comes back home, it is to realize that he has lost contact with his family and his former self. No one wants to hear about his war experiences—not the true stories, anyway.

A distaste for everything that had happened to him in the war set in, because of the lies he has told. All the times that had been able to make him feel cool and clear inside him when he thought about them; the times when he had done the one thing, the only thing for a man to do, easily and naturally, when he might have done something else, now lost their cool, valuable quality, and then were lost themselves.
⁸

At home, a kind of apathy makes him spend his days reading or playing pool. He would like a girl, but cannot overcome the apathy enough to go to the trouble of finding one. One morning his mother talks to him during breakfast:

^‘
God has some work for everyone to do,
’
his mother said. There can be no idle hands in his kingdom.
’

This sort of thing is notoriously meaningless to the Outsider. Krebs tells her:

‘
I
’
m not in his kingdom
.’

‘
We are all of us in his kingdom.
’

Krebs felt embarrassed and resentful, as always.

His mother asks him:

‘
Don
’
t you love your mother, dear boy?
¹

‘
No,
’
said Krebs.

His mother looked at him across the table. Her eyes were shiny. She started crying.

‘
I don
’
t love anybody,
’
Krebs said.

It wasn
’
t any good. He couldn
’
t tell her; he couldn
’
t make her see it. It was silly to have said it
…

‘
I didn
’
t mean it,
’
he said.
‘
I was just angry at something. I didn
’
t mean I didn
’
t love you.
’
…

‘
I
’
m your mother,
’
she said.
‘
I held you next to my heart when you were a tiny baby.
’

Krebs felt sick and vaguely nauseated.
⁹

She insists on their kneeling together to pray. He submits, but cannot pray when she asks him to. Afterwards he reflects:

He had tried to keep his life from being complicated. Still, none of it had touched him. He had felt sorry for his mother and she had made him lie about it. He would go to Kansas City and get a job
…

Krebs
’
s similarity to Camus
’
s Meursault is immediately striking. With the difference that Krebs
’
s state of mind is the result of specific experiences, while Meursault
’
s is natural to him, Krebs and Meursault would be almost interchangeable in their two stories. The difference is important though. Meursault reached a state of being
‘
cool and clear inside
’
on the eve of his execution; it came too late. Krebs had been through experiences during the war that had given him the sense of freedom; now, back in his home town, he knows that this way of life is
not
freedom. The times when he has done
‘
the one thing, the only thing for a man to do, easily and naturally
’
has given
him a glimpse of meaning, of a part of himself that is not contented with the trivial and unheroic.
Freedom lies in finding a course of action that gives expression to that part of him.

This is the theme of a great deal of Hemingway
’
s early work. The first novel,
The Sun also Rises
(the title taken from the Book of Ecclesiastes) has a stifling atmosphere of the trivial and unheroic. The hero, Jake Barnes, has been through the war, and a serious wound in the genitals has made him incapable of consummating sexual union with a woman. The wound is symbolic of the whole tragedy of unrealized freedom. The woman he loves has to take other men for physical satisfaction. Paris of the nineteen-twenties is a futile round of drinking and dancing; the futile people of the
‘
Waste Land
’
:
‘
I see crowds of people walking around in a ring.
⁵
Hemingway does not turn to the past, to the Biblical prophets or Dante
’
s
Commedia,
for meaning. He is much less an intellectual than Eliot. He finds his memories of the heroic in his own past; in the war, in hunting and fishing in the Michigan backwoods. He finds it in the bullfighter who risks his life every day. But certainly he would agree with Sartre that
‘
Freedom is terror
’
; or possibly: Freedom is crisis. Jake Barnes goes on a fishing trip to Spain, and sees the running of the bulls, and in spite of his unhappy love affair, he is not too discontented with life. As with Meursault the pleasures of eating and drinking and sunlight make up for a great deal. Hemingway
’
s answer to the indictment of Eliot
’
s
‘
Waste Land
’
is: Seek out the heroic. Jake Barnes says in
The Sun also Rises
‘
Nobody ever lived their life all the way up except bullfighters.
’
¹⁰
The facts of Hemingway
’
s life fill in the picture that his work outlines. Everything he writes has a more or less immediate bearing on his own experience. The early stories (
‘
In Our Time
’
) deal with his childhood in the Michigan backwoods, and with later incidents in the war. The hero, Nick Adams, goes fishing or skiing or canoeing, or possesses a little Indian girl on a carpet of pine needles, and there is no shadow on his world; he reads Maurice Hewlett, G. K. Chesterton and Mark Twain. Everything is fun. The war makes the difference. When he returns from it, the notion of evil has entered his life, the idea of a fundamental disharmony that cannot be evaded in sport or whoring. In various stories and novels, Hemingway gives different versions of how the
‘
fall
’
took place. The voice telling the stories is always personal enough to excuse us for
regarding them as all part of the same legend. Nick Adams is wounded and shell-shocked. Propped up against a wall in a retreat, he comments:
‘
Senta, Rinaldi, senta.
You and me, we
’
ve made our separate peace.
’
The nameless hero of
‘
A Very Short Story
’
has a love affair with a nurse in hospital in Padua; later, when she betrays him, he contracts gonorrhoea from a shopgirl in Chicago. Jake Barnes was made sexually impotent. Frederick Henry of
A Farewell to Arms
has the love affair with the nurse that was sketched in
‘
A Very Short Story
’
, but loses her when she dies in childbirth. After the publication of
A Farewell to Arms
in 1929, Hemingway
’
s work takes on the nihilistic colouring of Wells
’
s
Mind at the End of Its Tether;
the stifling feeling of thought turning on itself.

After the war, Hemingway found himself in somewhat the same position as Corporal Krebs, with the past dead on his hands, the future a possible
‘
posthumous existence
’
. The early stories begin the attempt to reconstruct the past; the Nick Adams cycle are his Garden of Eden legend. Then follows the major attempt at reconstruction,
A Farewell to Arms.
This is Hemingway
’
s most satisfying single performance; more than anything before, it conveys a sense of warmth, of excitement in reliving a fragment of
temps perdu.
In the novels that followed, the early spring quality was lost; they seem cold in comparison.
A Farewell to Arms
opens with a skilful evocation of the sense of meaninglessness, of confusion, of the soldier in a strange country. Drinking in cafes
‘
when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop
’
and
‘
Nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you,
and the world all unreal in the dark
‘
ⁿ
And when Frederick
Henry starts an affair with a nurse, it is all happening at three removes from him: