The Misunderstanding

Camus’s description of his chosen setting underscores his thematic exploration of Self-Determination, Fate, and the Search for Meaning in an Absurd World. The Scene 1 stage directions have Jan alone, looking out the window as “night begins to creep into his room” (182). The combination of staging and diction characterizes night as an indifferent—almost malevolent—and ever-encroaching existential void one confronts alone. Even though Jan longs for happiness, he finds himself confronted by inescapable cosmic indifference. The tension between Jan’s desire and the indifferent world exemplifies Camus’s idea of the absurd.

Jan’s response to his existential predicament follows the logic of tragic irony. He makes a distinction between his current setting and the idyllic seaside, which he associates with his love for Maria, saying: “[O]ver there, evenings are promises of happiness. But here…” (184). This clarity is short-lived. Turning away from this truth, Jan deludes himself that the anonymous cell of a room at the inn—a symbol of existential despair—is the key to answering whether or not he has a home in the world rather than simply returning to the place he feels happy, known, and loved. In so deluding himself, Jan unwittingly contributes to his tragic fate.

The conversation between Martha and Jan develops the irony of his predicament—and her own—underscoring The Tragedy of Miscommunication and the Importance of a Common Language, a central theme in the play. In his stubborn pursuit of his plan, Jan misses that Martha’s attempts to get rid of him betray her newfound doubts about the murder. Jan’s self-involved fantasy of being recognized by an ideal version of his mother and sister blinds him to his actual sister and her intent to murder him. Another miscommunication between the two highlights their existential disjunction: Martha hears in Jan’s request for “peace and quiet” a veiled desire for death—which, in her and her mother’s language, is the only thing that can bring true tranquility (187). Furthermore, Martha interprets Jan’s request to stay as a tacit acceptance of her planned crime. These misunderstandings and rationalizations proceed from her belief that her happiness has nothing to do with other people.

As both Martha and Jan sink deeper into themselves, Camus emphasizes that each is not only at cross purposes with the other but also at cross purposes with themselves—disconnects that eventually lead to their destruction. In getting Martha to talk about her hopes and disappointments, Jan thinks he has touched her humanity. In Jan’s revitalization of her dream of the sea, Martha believes she identifies her one true path to happiness. Both are mistaken. Jan reads into Martha’s hopes and disappointments his own definition of humanity as shared feeling, but Martha makes clear that her humanity lies not in shared feeling but in her desire for personal freedom—a desire she pursues at all costs. Although Martha outwardly dismisses Jan’s suggestion that happiness is to be found in those around her—not in some distant idyll—she whispers to herself that her longing for the seaside “blinds [her] to everything else” (188). Martha’s decision not only condemns Jan but also, ironically, precludes what she hopes it will achieve (freedom by the seaside).

Throughout Act II, Camus uses symbolism, particularly biblical allusion, to reinforce his key existential arguments. The cup of drugged tea that causes Jan’s ultimate suffering echoes the biblical motif of the cup of suffering and death from which one must drink to attain salvation. As elsewhere in the play, Camus subverts the biblical significance: Unlike Jesus and his disciples—who willingly drink from the cup knowing it is God’s will—Jan doesn’t know the cup’s true meaning, giving this allusion a macabre-comic connotation in the Mother’s perversion of the idea of salvation:

Yes, it’ll all be over soon. The waters are rising. And all the while, he has no idea. He sleeps. He no longer knows the exhausting feeling of working to make a decision, of working to be finished. He sleeps, no longer having to steel himself, to force himself, to demand of himself what he cannot do. The cross of that inner life that forbids rest, diversion, or weakness is no longer his to bear…He sleeps and thinks no more, no longer has any tasks or duties, oh no, no, and I, exhausted and old, oh, how I envy him his sleeping now and dying soon (204).

The Mother’s reference to “the cross of that inner life” (a Christian symbol of the necessity of enduring hardship on earth to attain salvation in heaven) ironizes this Christian precept of salvation through suffering. The telos (final goal) of Christian faith is acceptance into heaven, in which the faithful learn the true nature of God and the world. One must live and suffer consciously—bear one’s cross—with this end in mind. However, for the Mother the goal is not to bear this inner cross but to escape it because in the godless world of The Misunderstanding, there is no afterlife to justify earthly suffering. Accordingly, the Mother conceives salvation as the relief from suffering that can only come in sleep and—ultimately—death. The anaphora of “he sleeps” emphasizes unconsciousness over awareness and the abdication of duty over duty, further inverting the Christian precept of salvation through conscious suffering. In the Mother’s telling, acquiescence to final death supersedes duty to God as the guiding precept of life.

The river itself also has symbolic resonances. Mentions of steadily rising water punctuate Scene 8, casting an air of inexorability. The river itself as the site and means of Jan’s murder conjures the mythological motif of a river as the transition between life and death. However, in the bleak setting of The Misunderstanding, there is no far bank, no afterlife; the river isn’t liminal—it’s obliviating. Jan’s drowning also connotes baptism. In the Bible, baptism isn’t always a symbolic rebirth as a child of God; it also symbolizes death or purification through death (cf. Mark 10: 38-39, Luke 12: 50 NRSV). For Camus, Jan’s drowning—his “baptism”—isn’t purification but putrefaction: senseless death and decay in a nameless river devoid of divine meaning.