41 pages • 1 hour read
Albert CamusA Happy Death
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1971A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Movement
Movement is a recurring motif as Mersault tries to process his guilt. Mersault struggles to connect with those around him as much as he struggles to connect with his own self. He does not know how to deal with the guilt he feels for murdering Zagreus, nor does he know how to deal with his growing awareness that he may never be able to find happiness. Movement allows Mersault to distract himself from his problems.
His obsession with movement is hinted at in the chronological beginning of the story. Before he murders Zagreus, Mersault spends his evenings watching other people from his balcony. As he sits quietly and smokes cigarettes, other people move around in a social setting below him. They are distant and unavailable to Mersault, who categorizes himself as being in some way other to them. They are people who move while he is a stationary, detached observer who struggles to understand society. He focuses on the physical movement of the people and the way they pass through the streets as he has no way to comprehend the emotions they may be experiencing. In this part of the novel, movement is as alien to Mersault as emotions—both movement and emotions are ideas that belong to other people, not to himself.
When Mersault kills Zagreus, everything changes. For the first time, Mersault is forcibly connected to the world. He is no longer a detached and passive observer; he is an active agent of violence who has ended a life. Mersault can no longer feel like just a member of the audience, and he struggles to process guilt and fear. After spending most of his life as an alienated observer, Mersault feels overwhelmed by this sudden switch to being an involved figure in society.
Mersault is no longer limited to his balcony. In an effort to process his emotions, he mimics other people. Not understanding how to process his terrifying new feelings, Mersault mirrors the movement of others. He once watched other people move through the streets, and now he moves through them. He wanders the streets of Algiers, and then leaves the city to wander the streets of Prague. The more desperate he becomes, the quicker the pace of his movement. He walks, then runs, then drives, and then rides trains.
As he hurtles through physical space, mimicking the movement of the people he once watched, he does not deal with emotions that are beginning to overwhelm him. For Mersault, movement is a misplaced substitute for human connection. Unable to replicate the emotional dexterity of those around them, he parodies their physicality. He accelerates more and more as he becomes increasingly fearful of his own tortured mind.
Ultimately, Mersault’s movement grinds to a halt. He stops in the house above the world and then in the village in the mountains. These are respites from pain, as he cannot stand still. He is bothered by his past and so alienated from the world that he cannot forge emotional connections. Mersault collapses several times; walking takes a toll on him and eventually ends his life. Symbolically, the effort of mimicking movement kills Mersault: He understands only the physical world while remaining detached from the emotional.
Algiers
A Happy Death is set in the city of Algiers during the period of French colonial occupation. The colonized city functions as a liminal space where characters are caught between Algerian and French identity.
Mersault, for example, is a French-Algerian man. He is not entirely French or Algerian; his existence is a product of the French colonial occupation which divided the country and—in the coming years—will lead to a fierce, violent war for independence waged by the Algerians against the French occupying forces. The city represents the spaces between cultures. The prevalence of the French language and French food and culture illustrates how France’s colonizing process operates, while the city’s physical space remains inherently Algerian. Mersault flits between these spaces, occupying the liminal space of the colonized and the colonizer, the Algerian and the French.
This facilitates Mersault’s alienation. He cannot connect meaningfully to a culture to which he feels he does not belong. He is not French, and he is not Algerian. Instead, he is like the city in which he lives, operating in the space between both, unable to fully commit to either. Almost a forebear of the war for independence, Mersault’s alienation culminates in a brutal murder. His unwitting internalization of the violence of colonialism—against the bodies and culture of the colonized people—manifests in Zagreus’s death.
After Zagreus’s death, Mersault tries to flee Algiers. He packs up his possessions and newfound fortune and cavorts across Central Europe. However, his plan fails miserably. He cannot forget his past and the image of the murdered man looms at the forefront of his mind. Mersault feels himself drawn back to Algiers, as he cannot resist the city. Algiers may be a scene of violence and colonization, but Mersault is a product of this city. He is the child of Algiers, and his failure to integrate into the European cities of Prague, Vienna, or Genoa suggests the inherent contradictions of colonization.
Mersault, like Algiers, will never be European. He may speak the language and operate in the same cultural spaces, but something about him will always feel out of place in Europe. He is not accepted in Prague and, in other cities, he is wanted only for his money. He is exploited by the Europeans and rejected by them socially. Mersault feels himself drawn back to Algiers because the city feels sympathetic to him. Only by leaving Algiers is he able to understand the extent to which he is a product of his environment.
Mersault’s fleeting proximity to Algiers represents his inner turmoil. He leaves the city, then returns, and then flees again to a small town in the Chenoua. That he doesn’t trust himself to remain in one place reflects the traumatized nature of his mind. He cannot settle in a physical sense because he cannot settle emotionally. Though he feels drawn back to Algiers at all times, he now associates the city with violence and alienation. He has lost his home but he cannot leave, so he exists on the periphery.
By exiling himself to a small town in the mountains, Mersault punishes himself. He denies himself the proximity to the one city which he understands and which understands him. Mersault’s coming and going from Algiers represents the extent to which he blames and wishes to punish himself for his crimes, even if he is unable to explicitly admit this.
Disassociation, Sickness, and the Human Body
Mersault’s alienation from society is an emotional condition but expresses itself physically. Mersault’s body becomes a physical manifestation of the deep emotional issues which he faces. At various points in the novel, Mersault examines his body and does not recognize his hands or legs. His limbs are like strangers to him, the appendages of an unknown person, which just so happen to be attached to him.
These moments of physical alienation are often associated with immoral acts. Disassociation first happens in the wake of Zagreus’s murder and then when Mersault remembers what he has done. The man who was so detached from society that he observed the world from a balcony is forced to reckon with the reality of a brutal murder. Mersault does not recognize his hands because he struggles to recognize the kind of person who would commit murder.
Alienation is also a coping mechanism. Mersault tries to process his guilt by convincing himself that the murderous limbs belong to another person. If someone else was in control of his hands, then he isn’t responsible for their actions. The split between character and limbs bothers him so much since it cannot persist. Mersault knows what he has done, even if he does not recognize himself. His alienation from his own limbs is a metaphor for his struggles to come to terms with the consequences of his actions.
At first, the murder seemed to be a perfunctory chore for a friend in exchange for money. For a man as alienated and cut off as Mersault, the act seemed inconsequential. Mersault only realizes the brutality of what he has done in the aftermath. Zagreus’s blood and the broken skull are so shocking that Mersault is temporarily jolted out of his alienation. His methodical approach to the murder comes to a crashing halt, and he stops to study Zagreus’s body with mounting horror. The image never leaves him.
The dead body is a remedy for social alienation; it shocks Mersault enough to make him feel genuine emotion. Zagreus’s dead body is a metaphor for the fickle nature of life and a reminder to Mersault of what he has to lose, even if he feels that there is nothing worth living for.
Eventually, Mersault becomes sick and dies. His sickness is slow to arrive but then completely takes over his body. He becomes a shivering, feverish man who slips in and out of a coma. His failing heart symbolizes the toll that alienation and murder have taken on him. His body has been overwhelmed by the negative emotions which he has tried so long to repress. They have festered within him, rotting him from the inside out and breaking his heart.
He wants to be awake when dying, requesting that Bernard gives him adrenaline. This is as close as Mersault comes to accepting responsibility for his actions. He chooses a conscious death; not just conscious in the sense of being awake, but conscious of his own failures.
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By Albert Camus
