Consciousness and Judgement: Parallels Between The Stranger and Native Son

*Just as a general warning, this blog post will contain some fairly major spoilers for Native Son, so if you’re considering taking African American Lit next year, please keep that in mind! I don’t think it’s necessarily a book that’s ruined if you know the main plot points beforehand, but read at your own risk.*

While reading and discussing The Stranger these past few weeks, I was continually reminded of the novel Native Son, published just two years earlier. There are obvious similarities in the novels’ plot structures—both center on protagonists who commit a murder, are imprisoned and put on trial, and are eventually sentenced to death for their actions—but I think there’s also a lot of overlap in the deeper themes they explore.

In terms of their structure, both The Stranger and Native Son have almost the feeling of a Shakespearean tragedy: we witness the life of the main character slowly unravel as they’re drawn into an escalating situation, which culminates in them murdering an innocent person. In The Stranger, Meursault’s neutrality causes him to be pulled bit by bit into Raymond’s underworld. Each time they meet the Arab men on the beach, he engages with them more directly, until in his one-on-one final confrontation, he kills one of them. In Native Son, the main character, a young Black man named Bigger Thomas, gets a job as a chauffeur for Mary Dalton, the daughter of a wealthy white businessman. After she gets drunk during a night out with her boyfriend, he carries her back to her bedroom and begins to kiss her. Her blind mother enters, and Bigger, fearing what will happen if he’s caught with a white girl in her bedroom, panics and smothers Mary with a pillow.

One especially important parallel between the novels is their main characters’ apparent lack of a consciousness, resulting in them committing murders almost without obvious intent or responsibility. Both Meursault and Bigger seem to move through their everyday lives without really experiencing much introspection or emotion. They act mostly to satisfy their immediate desires and impulses, and have little in the way of ambition or dreams for their futures. In Meursault’s case, this simply appears to be his nature—regardless of whether we might retrospectively label him as a sociopath or something similar, it seems like he just happens to have these unconventional qualities. For Bigger, his way of being is framed much more as a reaction to the world around him: his life has been so profoundly defined by racism that his emotions are dominated by hatred for and fear of the white society that oppresses him, and he stops having hope for the future because his race prevents him from fulfilling what were once his dreams.

The result, in both novels, is a character who essentially lives moment-to-moment, and is detached from both their surroundings and their own actions. Both of these men end up committing murder almost unconsciously, as a knee-jerk reaction to an outside force (for Meursault, the glare of the sun; for Bigger, the appearance of Mrs. Dalton and everything she signifies). These circumstances create a morally ambiguous crime, begging the question of whether someone can be held responsible for an action that is almost outside of their control.

Each novel also features a court case in which the events of the story, and the protagonists themselves, are essentially “put on trial.” In doing so, they reveal the flaws in a justice system that doesn’t necessarily succeed in delivering justice. In particular, rather than focusing on the crimes themselves, the courts in the novels make it their task to judge the morality of the accused person. The prosecutors in both novels essentially argue that the main character’s nature makes them not just guilty of the crime they’re accused of, but a threat to the fabric of society. In the eyes of the Algerian court, Meursault’s stoicism at his mother’s funeral is as much evidence of the danger he poses as the murder he commits; more disturbingly, Bigger’s race (and especially his loaded status as a Black man in relation to Mary’s white femininity) renders him a monster in the eyes of the court long before his trial begins. In these distinct ways, both characters are stripped of their humanity, even as we, the readers, see them respond to their trial, imprisonment, and eventual condemnation in a profoundly human way. By positioning the reader inside the heads of these seemingly unconscious characters, even allowing us to be the sole witnesses to the murders they commit, both novels allow us to come to conclusions about their morality based in deep understanding, and perhaps casts doubt on whether the systems justice can do the same.