The Misunderstanding

“I don’t like insinuations. Crime is crime, and you have to know what you’re after.”

Martha’s frankness, one of her defining characteristics, manifests itself in the certainty of her desire for the seaside. In contrast to Jan, who lies to himself about what he really wants, Martha has no such dissonance. In existentialist terms, Martha lives in good faith, while Jan lives in bad faith. The moral ambiguity characteristic of the play arises from their opposite intents: Jan seeks to do good in pursuit of happiness, but Martha seeks to do ill.

“It does seem true that life is crueler than we are. Maybe that’s why I find it hard to feel guilty.”

The Mother and Martha each repeatedly rationalize their crimes in different ways. Here, the Mother argues that the absurd senselessness of the world grants them license to drug and drown people, a more peaceful death than most. Camus presents these moral gymnastics not as the work of an evil person but of one driven to indifference by a disappointing life.

“I’ve had enough of always having to carry my soul around with me. I can’t wait to find a country where the sun kills all questions. This place here is not my home.”

Rich in symbolism, this line alludes to Martha’s existential predicament. Beset by the existential anxieties of her soul in landlocked Europe, Martha longs to obliviate those questions in the sun, a symbol of an absolute world devoid of uncertainty. Martha’s initial mistake is in not realizing that the world isn’t a home to anyone; everyone experiences the absurd—the disjunction between the urgency of one’s desire and the indifference of the world.

“Yes, this is it. It was twenty years ago I walked out that door. My sister was a little girl then. She was playing over there in that corner. My mother didn’t come to hug me. I didn’t really think much of it at the time.”

The information Camus gives on Jan’s history with his mother and sister underscores the self-importance of Jan’s hope for recognition without identification. He believes he’s so recognizable that his sister, who was only a child when he left, will recognize him 20 years later, and he expects his mother, with whom he wasn’t close, to recognize him as well. In this light, Camus frames Jan’s plan as both folly and tragedy.

“I guess it’s not as easy as they say, though, to come back home again. It takes a little time to make a son out of a stranger.”

Throughout the play, Jan confronts the folly of believing it will be easy to reconcile with his family only to dismiss these doubts and push forward in blind hope. His phrasing illustrates that there are no immutable roles, no irrevocable loci of meaning; relationships are built, not bestowed. A son doesn’t stay a son in his absence; he must be present to maintain that relationship.

“How could you not be treated as a stranger in a house where you present yourself as a stranger?”

Maria succinctly states the self-sabotaging nature of Jan’s plan. To be recognized, one must identify oneself as anyone else would—a convention from which, in his self-importance, Jan thinks he is exempt. His belief reveals his hope that his identity is certain and immutable. Once a son, always a son, he believes. However, Camus asserts that in the entropy of the absurd world, identity is always subject to decay.

“I don’t need them, but I’ve come to realize they may need me, and that a man’s never really alone.”

Jan lies to himself about his reason for returning home. He longs not to help his mother and sister but to find in them an affirmation of himself as necessary and meaningful: the son who returns to rescue his mother and sister. Camus suggests that he is right to seek meaning in others but misguided in his quest to be a savior—an archetypal role that exists only in parable. To live with others is to need and be needed, not solely to provide.

“Wouldn’t it be best, for both of us, to keep our distance?”

Martha’s suggestion to Jan illustrates her belief about humanity: At best, other people are unnecessary to one’s happiness; at worst, they impede it. Jan’s insistence on talking of emotion forces Martha to confront the undeniable fact that another person with desires exists in addition to herself. Avoiding the anguish that comes from recognizing one is responsible for doing one’s best not to harm others, Martha instead resorts to the safety of aloofness.

“[W]e welcome you here out of our own interest, and in peace and quiet, and if we keep you here, it will be out of our own interest, and in peace and quiet.”

The motif of peace and quiet symbolizes the desire for assured happiness in a world that perpetually disrupts it. Martha remains unabashed in expressing her self-interest because she believes this attitude is common to everyone, indicating her solipsistic view of the world, a view fundamentally at odds with Camus’s philosophy of absurdism.

“I have no patience left for this Europe where autumn wears the face of spring and spring the scent of poverty.”

Martha longs to live in a world where things are what they’re supposed to be, pointing to a desire for fixed meaning. Camus subverts the traditional understanding of spring as a symbol of rebirth through Martha's experience of it as a dismal time because in her Europe, spring brings scant regrowth, denying her the promise of happiness. In contrast, “autumn wears the face of spring” for her because as spring heralds summer—a symbol of full life—autumn heralds winter: the symbol of death that matches Martha’s disillusionment.

“You certainly have no reason to oppose them. But you don’t have any reason to fulfill them, either, and in some cases, that’s enough to set things in motion.”

Martha believes that in a world devoid of divine attention, she has license to pursue her happiness at all costs, highlighting Camus’s thematic interest in Self-Determination, Fate, and the Search for Meaning in an Absurd World. The urgency of her desire is the only thing real to her; without an authority like God, she sees no reason to be moral. Her ominous words fail to tip Jan to her true intentions, and he is thus unwittingly condemned to death.

“Yes, everything will be settled here in this room.

But how cold it is! I don’t recognize a thing. The whole place has been redone. It looks like any other hotel room now, in any of those other foreign cities where lonely men show up each night. I’ve been there. At the time, it seemed there was an answer to be found. Maybe I’ll find it here.”

Jan’s obliviousness to the folly of his quest is ironic to the point of parody. Even once he arrives at the answer to his question of whether or not he has an immutable home in the world—he doesn’t because no one does in an absurd world—he immediately turns away from this truth back to his blind pursuit of illusion. His reflection on the setting heightens the dramatic irony: Surrounded by once familiar things now strange, he nonetheless fails to see that no place can hold meaning forever.

“I’d at least like to thank you…I also want you to know that, as a guest, I won’t be leaving this house indifferent.”

Camus suggests that, unlike Martha, Jan’s fatal flaw is not a lack of feeling, but rather too much of it. He expresses too much emotion to people who know him only as a stranger. However, after less than a day in Martha and the Mother’s company, he learns to keep his emotions to himself. His final words to his mother are at once heartfelt and comically sterile: Simply to express thanks and benevolence is to breach Martha and the Mother’s standard of propriety.

“He sleeps. He’s through with this world. Everything will be easy for him from now on. He’ll just slip from a slumber peopled with images to a slumber without dreams, and what comes as a terrible wrenching for everyone else will be nothing but a long sleep for him.”

Just as Martha clings to the fantasy of the seaside idyll, the Mother clings to the fantasy of death as a peaceful relief. She rationalizes her and Martha’s murder with fatigue, asserting that their method is less cruel than life’s. However, instead of justifying it by her own weariness, she justifies it by the supremacy of oblivion indicating that the only thing the disillusioned Mother still desires is deliverance from the world.

“Of course this house is not his home, but that’s because it’s nobody’s, and nobody will ever find rest or warmth in it. If he’d understood that a little quicker, he would have saved himself, and we’d have avoided having to teach him that this room of ours is made for sleeping, and this world of ours for dying.”

Martha justifies murder in her own way, blaming Jan for being oblivious to the true nature of the world as absurd. According to Camus’s philosophy, Martha’s premise is correct, but her conclusion is false: While the world is indeed made for dying in that all are mortal, that doesn’t give one license to kill. Like her mother, Martha attempts to avoid guilt by evoking the euphemism of sleep.

“I know, Martha. It’s not rational. What can grief possibly mean to a criminal? But you can see it’s not the sort of pain a real mother would feel. I haven’t even cried out yet. No, it’s nothing more than the suffering of love reborn, and yet, it’s more than I can bear. I know this suffering has no reason either.

(with a new tone)

But I, who’ve tasted it all, from creation to destruction, I have to say, the world itself isn’t rational.”

The Mother’s reaction to the revelation of Jan’s identity expresses the fundamental ambiguity of living in an absurd world. Caught between her criminality and her motherhood, the Mother cannot explain her grief, underscoring Camus’s position that it’s impossible to fully understand the world. However, one must nevertheless live to the best of one’s ability. The Mother’s crisis comes from having renounced emotion. In its resurgence, emotion suddenly restores her moral faculty at the very moment when it will cause the most pain—the pain she sought to avoid in indifference.

“What you have to understand is that for a man who has lived, death is but a small concern.”

For Martha, Jan represents all the things she’s been denied. She feels indignance over Jan having found the freedom and happiness she longs for, using it as a corollary justification for murdering him. Her allusion to his death takes on a double meaning—it both hints at her intent to murder her brother and expresses a truth about a life well lived—the life that eludes Martha. To live fully is indeed to ease the fear of death.

“It’s not my job to convince you, only to inform you. You’ll come around to the truth in your own time.”

In her confrontation with Maria, Martha takes on a role similar to that of the Old Servant, whose goal is to impose the reality of the absurd, pointing to the theme of Existential Rebellion and Renunciation of the Absolute. The acknowledgment of this predicament is the cornerstone of Camus’s concept of rebellion. One’s first task in life must be to confront the naked truth; to ignore this reality is to fall prey to the danger of illusion.

“If you must know, there was a misunderstanding. And if you understand anything at all about the world, you won’t be surprised.”

Martha’s paradoxical phrasing expresses Camus’s belief about the limits of human comprehension. The world exceeds our attempts to understand it; to know this—that one’s knowledge has limits—is to know the world as it really is. Martha’s understatement of the murder as a mere misunderstanding illustrates both the extent of her moral disorientation and the truth of absurdity: to the indifferent world, a murder is indeed just a misunderstanding.

“He could have been your pride and joy, just as he’s been mine. But alas, you were his enemy—you are his enemy—you who can speak so coldly about something that should send you running out into the streets, kicking and screaming like a wild animal.”

Here, Maria alludes to Camus’s dialectic of solipsism and solidarity. One starts in the certainty of one’s suffering, then progresses to the realization that this suffering is shared, enabling them to make friends rather than enemies. Camus indicates that Martha doesn’t progress past this first stage. Maria’s simile suggests that the reason for this arrested development is Martha’s renunciation of her emotional—animal—side, framing indifference as an attitude of the mind and solidarity as an attitude of the heart.

“Your husband and I are also even. I felt the same desperation he did. Like him, I believed I had a home. I imagined crime was the hearth around which my mother and I were forever united. Who in this world could I turn to if not to the one who’d killed beside me? But I was wrong. Crime is its own form of solitude, even if a thousand people commit it together. So it’s only right I should die alone, after having lived and killed alone.”

Camus positions this statement as Martha’s admission of guilt: She acknowledges that she alone was responsible for her actions, despite having committed them with her mother. Martha progresses to realizing the shared suffering of absurdity before immediately retreating into solitude. Crime is its own form of solitude because it breaks the social contract one has with others. Despite her retreat—and guilt in her brother’s murder—Martha nonetheless reclaims from indifference her sense of accountability.

“Shut up! I don’t want to hear any more talk of him. I loathe him! He’s nothing to you anymore. He’s gone to that bitter house now, the one we’re exiled to forever. The fool! He got what he wanted, he found who he was looking for, and now here we all are, everything in order. Understand, then, that neither for him nor for us, neither in life nor in death, is there ever any peace or homeland.”

Self-righteous indignation is an attitude common to Camus’s characters. Here, as elsewhere, he presents this indignation as justified in that it is an assertion of self in a world where one can never know whether one is right. To live, he suggests, is to hazard oneself, pointing to his definition of tragedy as a conflict between equally justified forces: On the one side is Jan, illusion, and death; on the other is Martha, Maria—the living—and the absurd world. For Jan to believe it is possible to contravene this order is as unjustified as it is for Martha to blame him for his ignorance.

“We’re being robbed, I tell you. What’s the point of this great call, this emergency of the soul? Why cry out for the sea or love? It’s pathetic. Well, your husband knows the answer now: it’s that dreadful house where we’ll all eventually be packed nice and tight together.”

In this passage, Martha’s cri de coeur is the perfect expression of the absurd: the conflict between the urgency of one’s longing, the vividness of one’s dreams, and the utter indifference of a world that ends in death. However, Martha draws from this the pessimistic conclusion that Camus himself does not. Camus asserts that one must pursue a meaningful life despite the world’s indifference. To abandon these projects is to forsake one’s only means of happiness.