The Misunderstanding

Act III transitions the thematic focus from absurdity and miscommunication to Existential Rebellion and Renunciation of the Absolute. Martha, Maria, and the Mother each respond to the absurd in archetypal ways. In her newfound grief, the Mother renounces life for death. Similarly, the bereft Maria forsakes life for God. Finally, Martha renounces her fantasy of total happiness by the seaside and begrudgingly acknowledges that her suffering in a world negligent to her desires isn’t unique to her.

In their renunciations of life, the Mother and Maria serve as foils to Martha, the nascent rebel. Once the only character in the play to have been happy, Maria forsakes life and appeals to God for salvation after Jan’s murder. Her withdrawal from emotion and the world echoes that of Martha and the Mother in the first two acts. Camus suggests such cloistering is a perennial temptation in a world where meaning is never secure. The motifs of this renunciation appear in Maria’s lament to Martha: “I’ll let you die as you wish. I’m blind now. I can’t even see you. And neither you nor your mother will ever be but fugitive faces met and lost amid a tragedy that never ends” (226). Maria’s indifference, her detachment from others symbolized by blindness, and the obliteration of Martha and the Mother in memory all recall previous characterizations of Martha and her mother.

The idea of common humanity appears in an ambiguous statement Maria makes following the revelation of Jan’s murder. She confesses to Martha: “In truth, I’ve hardly had time to suffer or rebel. The misfortune is greater than I am” (226). Her statement has both individual and broad meanings. Confined to Maria, these words convey how the abrupt revelation of Jan’s murder paralyzes her, preventing her from feeling both the full weight of her grief and that of her rage—which, as she says, would make her “rebel” against (i.e., attack) Maria (221). She believes the suffering is hers alone and therefore unendurable—no one can console or sympathize with her. Camus’s stage directions have Maria hiding her face from Martha as she speaks these words, indicating her withdrawal into herself and detachment from humanity. The connotation of hiding one’s face suggests Camus sees such withdrawal as shameful, if also pitiable.

Understood as a broader existential statement, Martha’s statement suggests an irony to which only Martha and the audience have access. The misfortune is greater than Maria in that it is shared—in the absurd world, many people suffer senseless tragedies. Maria’s denial of this fact stops Martha from leaving, prompting her to voice a brutal truth: Everyone is condemned to go unrecognized through life (227). For Camus, it is in the shared acknowledgment of the injustice of this existential anonymity that solidarity forms. Maria, however, deafens herself to this truth, opting against the rebellion that Camus believes frees one from isolation.

Like Maria, the Mother takes a fatalistic view of Jan’s death, pointing to Camus’s thematic engagement with Self-Determination, Fate, and the Search for Meaning in an Absurd World. Indeed, there is the connotation of preordainment in the god-like Old Servant ensuring Jan remains a stranger. However, this view ignores that Jan himself inaugurated his masquerade and that Martha and the Mother murdered him. Fatalism blinds Maria and the Mother to the purely human causes of his death. The Mother uses this logic of inevitability to explain the necessity of taking her own life. Once disillusioned and unfeeling, the Mother experiences grief and guilt over her son’s death, but these resurrected feelings are too much of a shock. Like the disillusionment that preceded them, they drive the Mother away from life. After years of living directionless, the Mother finds calming certainty in the endurance of Jan’s love for her. In existential bad faith, she latches onto the security of the predefined role of mother, forsaking the rest of herself. Consequently, she concludes she no longer has a purpose: “When a mother is no longer able to recognize her own son, her role on this earth is over” (210). For the Mother, the meaning of her life—her motherhood—becomes a reason to die following her murder of her son.

Camus further emphasizes the necessity of existential rebellion and the danger of illusions through the biblically inflected confrontation between Martha and Maria (See Literary Devices: Biblical Allusion). Like the biblical Martha, Camus’s Martha is indignant that her sibling has left her alone, responsible for the household. Like the biblical Mary, post-tragedy Maria focuses her entire self on God. However, in a reversal of the biblical symbolism, in Camus’s godless world, it is Mary who is misguided—not Martha. For Camus, workaday tasks are all one has—to turn away from them as Maria does is to renounce life. 

As the Old Servant’s final word underscores, Camus believes such renunciation can only end in devastation. Indignant rebellion against the fact of death is the only attitude that affirms the supreme value of life itself. To lose oneself in fantasies of salvation is to attenuate that supreme value. As Martha states, life is always preferable to death: “What do I want with their [the Mother and Jan’s] company? I’ll leave them to their newfound affection, to their dark embrace. Neither you [Maria] nor I have any part in it anymore” (223). Martha’s is a message of perseverance, not total despair. Martha chooses life even when everything has gone wrong and in doing so recognizes her free will. Camus believes this affirmation of life is the foundation of any human-built sense of meaning and morality. However, Martha doesn’t take Camus’s suggested next step toward community, opting instead to live out her life in solitude.