Manifestations of Eros and Thanatos in L'Etranger

Abstract

L'lTtranger is clearly structured by portrayals of death: there are three deaths portrayed-that of Meursault's mother, which opens the work; that of the Arab, which constitutes the pivotal event of the entire plot; and finally that of Meursault himself, which closes it. Thus, death is not only nearly constantly present in the novell (three times in this very short work), but these deaths constitute by far the most remarkable and dramatic events in the story-partly because all the rest is portrayed with unrelieved drabness, partly because of the special status of these deaths and the exceptional character of their portrayal. The death of the Mother is particularly traumatic, because the generative function of the Mother is such that her death represents the death of the principle of life itself, of the principle of passage from stasis to movement. The death of the Arab is the death of the Other, which draws its dramatic character from the function of the Other as the primary source of Self-consciousness. And the death of the Other is an image of the death of the Selfit enables the Self to conceive of the inconceivable, namely, the termination of its own existence; the extraordinary nature of this event is reflected in both style and action: the style takes on a quality of lyrical evocation, and action is presented in a slow-motion, ritual fashion which takes us out of the profane dimension and into the sacred. Finally, there is the death of the Self, which involves the death of the narrator and therefore of discourse; it also plays a parallel or antithetical role to the first death-just as the death of the Mother represented the death of birth, so the death of the son represents