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The psychoanalysis of characters in a modern literary work is a perilous project. The 20th century literary artist immersed in Freudian precepts of mind and motivation often strikes some compromise between self-consciously portraying psychology in Freudian terms and giving flesh to his own intrapsychic struggles. In addition the author's conscious intention may be to subvert, defensively displace, or tautologically assert that which the psychoanalytic critic is in search of. The psychoanalyst must be wary of the modern virtuoso artificer. However this restraint, it seems to me, may be suspended in the case of textual mysteries; anomalies where both character and author stand befuddled before their own project.
Such a mystery lies at the heart of Albert Camus' The Stranger. The central act and central scotoma of the novel is Meursault's murder of the Arab. This act led Edmund Wilson to declare the work inexplicable. Camus' biographer called the portrayal of this event “the most puzzling pages Camus ever wrote” (McCarthy, p. 155). Why does Meursault kill? Why the Arab? Why does he fire four shots into a body already made lifeless by a first round?
In terse bits of prose Meursault introduces himself to the reader:
Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure. The telegram from the home says: ‘Your Mother
Page 359Passed Away Funeral Tomorrow. Deep Sympathy’ which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday, (p. 1)
The narrator's logic scurries away from the emotionally charged content of the telegram, and fixes instead on a temporal detail. Meursault does not seem concerned with his Mother's death. Instead he simply would like to establish the date of her demise. Furthermore the narrator is not content with alluding to this temporal detail once; he repeats himself. Like Leonardo Da Vinci's remembrance of his recently deceased father (Freud, 1910), this passage reveals the narrator's defenses—displacement and repetition—fully mobilized to deny the express