Camus on happiness and The Stranger

Hello everyone, I’m Stephen West, and this is Philosophize This!

Today we’re going to start talking about Albert Camus and how perfectly he fits into the conversation we’ve been having lately.

Most people have heard of his book The Stranger. It’s one of the most famous books in history, so that’s to be expected. But far fewer people know about something else from him that I think is just as exciting: the novel he wrote right before The Stranger.

It’s a book he chose never to publish during his lifetime for reasons we’ll get into. It was only published after his death by his estate.

Nonetheless, if your goal is to understand Camus as well as you can then reading this book is important for seeing how his thinking was evolving during the late 1930s. It also contains context that’s often missed if you want to understand his full project as a thinker.

The book is called A Happy Death. So I guess it fits that it mostly focuses on the idea of happiness.

Now if that sounds a little confusing given what you already know about Camus, you have every right to be confused.

Why would Camus start, write, and finish a book about happiness, then choose never to publish it, and then make his next published novel about a character who seems to care almost nothing about happiness?

That’s one of the questions I want to answer by the end of this post.

If you’re here because you’re reading The Stranger, even in just the first few pages you’ll notice it’s written from the perspective of a guy named Meursault. A character who is famously indifferent to the world around him.

You’ve probably heard the first line of the novel. Some people practically have a conniption fit over it: “Mother died yesterday, or was it the day before… I can’t remember.”

It’s a famous line for good reason. Just a few words into the book, we already know a lot about who Meursault is as a character.

He doesn’t play the game of society the way other people do. He doesn’t put on any affect just to please people. Meursault represents an indifference to the usual ways people get their meaning in the world, and as a reader you feel like there’s something deeply unrelatable about his experience. What kind of person cares so little about their mother