Complete Closure

In Camus's The Stranger gaps lead the reader to infer more about who Meursault is and his views about the world. Or rather to infer who he is since Camus does not give too much of who he is. Not till the end of the novel. Meusraults disengagement and indifference to everything around him is evident throughout the whole novel, but his thoughts can be lightly inferred. "I recognized it as the same one that had been ringing in my ears for many long days, and I realized that time I had been talking to myself. Then I remembered what the nurse at Maman's funeral said. No, there was no way out, and no one can imagine what nights in prison are like." (page 81). In Meursaults nights of solitude boredom and reflection in prison, he is revealed more than in the first part of the book.  Why remember what a nurse told him at his mothers funeral? Both seemed irrelevant to him, but the nurse sympathized with Meursaults existential views of the world. Muersault remembered the nurse telling him "'If you go slowly, you risk getting sunstroke. But if you go too fats, you work up a sweat and then catch a chill inside the church.' She was right"(page 17). Both the nurse and Meursalut believe that one way or another death is inevitable and it is the only thing that is certain. Later, Meursault reveals how death will come soon or late, but it will come so there is no difference in living more time or less time. In page 81, before Meursault's trail or his final conversation with the Chaplain, Camus already gave away Meursaults thoughts on everyones destiny. There is nothing missing to Meursaults thoughts when he remembers the nurse, just interpretation. Meursault has contemplated death before his final trail and after and his thoughts on it have always been the same. The difference is that when he gave them all, death was just around the corner.

The novel finishes with Meursault's final wish: "For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate"(page 123). Meursault feels he successfully overcame judgement and society and wants people to remember him with hatred for that. He welcomes with satisfaction whatever is to come, if it is his death or his final moment of happiness. There is no need to read if Meursault was executed or not, he probably would have been executed, but instead the narration keeps suggesting that execution, or judgement, are meaningless. It is who we build of ourselves throughout self experience that matters and not what society makes of us. Why keep on writing about Meursault and his coming death, when the core of who Meursault was and how he overcame judgement were clear? Camus's invitation to infer more about this outsider make him a very complete character, and not the blunt, emotionless character that Meursault is thought to be in the beginning of the novel.