57 pages • 1-hour read
The Misunderstanding
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Symbols & Motifs
The Seaside
The seaside symbolizes the illusory hope for total happiness and freedom from the world’s constraints, the latter of which are represented by the claustrophobic setting of Central Europe. Jan describes—and Martha envisions—the seaside as an idyll of warmth and sun, boundless horizons, few people, endless flowers, and eternal spring and summer. However, the seaside is never a setting in the play. It exists only as a memory (to Jan and Maria) and as a fantasy (to Martha)—absent, inaccessible, existing only in their minds. This physical nonexistence indicates the unattainability of unassailable happiness and absolute meaning, emphasizing Camus’s thematic exploration of Self-Determination, Fate, and the Search for Meaning in an Absurd World.
Martha’s motive for committing the murder-robberies is to accumulate enough money to escape to the seaside, which she envisions as the panacea to her lifelong misery in the shadows of landlocked Central Europe. Following the revelation of Jan’s true identity—which kills her dream—Martha describes what she had hoped to find: “Out there, where you can escape, can be delivered, can roll in the waves and press your body against another’s, out on that land defended by the sea, the gods dare not set foot” (217). Martha doesn’t want to assuage her dissatisfaction in the heavens, toward which her landlocked European home forces her eyes. Instead, she wants to find happiness on earth, where “the gods dare not set foot” (217). The seaside is the heaven Martha longs for in an absurd world free from divine intervention.
From the beginning of the play, Martha replaces the promise of absolute meaning through faith in God with the promise of absolute meaning in an earthly heaven. Martha’s fantasy of the seaside is the longing to live in a world of absolutes where everything is what it is and nothing is ambiguous. Her description of this place as sun-blasted symbolizes her desire to eradicate the shadows that pervade her Europe. Shadows symbolize the existential uncertainties afflicting her soul; full sun symbolizes the eradication of these uncertainties. Martha’s desire for the sun to render her “body radiant but empty on the inside […] to find a country where the sun kills all questions” is the desire for an impossible resolution of her existential anxieties—a secular analog for divine absolution (152). The urgency of Martha’s desire for this utopia allows her to justify any means necessary for obtaining it. Camus suggests that just as belief in heaven ultimately moves one’s focus away from this life, belief in an earthly idyll blinds one to the reality of life as it must be lived. One’s hopes must be grounded in reality, not illusion—a precept Martha exemplifies in her Existential Rebellion and Renunciation of the Absolute.
Darkness and Foreclosed Horizons
Obscured by rain and clouds, the horizons of Central Europe symbolize confinement to a world indifferent to human happiness. The crushing reality of this world drives Martha to her fantasy of escape, which she blindly pursues to a tragic end.
The darkness pervading the Central Europe of The Misunderstanding symbolizes existential anxieties and the illusions conjured to assuage them. Camus’s motif of darkness evokes Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Plato describes a group of people who, confined to a cave, mistake shadows cast on the wall for reality. Only by escaping into the sunlight do they understand that the shadows were distorted pictures of the world. The lesson is that the senses are unreliable, and only through reason can one understand the true nature of the world. Camus deconstructs this thinking, asserting that it’s neither in shadow nor in full sun that one should live. While it’s untenable to live in shadow—ignorance of the absurd nature of the world—there’s also only so much people can understand about reality. For Camus, reason has its limits because, as the Mother states “the world itself isn’t rational” (212). Sunshine cannot eradicate uncertainty and grant full understanding because the absurd world is inherently senseless.
In his quest for an indelible home in the world, Jan encounters instead this desolate land that renders his quest absurd. When he can no longer deny his plan’s failure, he remarks, “It’s getting cloudy out. And now my old anxieties are coming back to me, here in the pit of my stomach, here like a raw wound irritated by every move I make. I know its name. It’s fear of eternal solitude, terror that there is no answer” (193). The descending clouds and darkness reflect the resurgence of Jan’s despair and symbolize how the indifferent world always encroaches on attempts to secure meaning.
For Martha, darkness isn’t the only thing foreclosing her horizons: She is also confined by the surrounding land and people who block her path to the seaside. After her mother abandons her, dashing her dream of happiness by the sea, Martha laments her predicament, saying: “Now I’m left to live with, on my right and on my left, in front of me and behind, crowds of peoples and nations, of plains and mountains that block out the sea breeze, smothering its repeated calls with their chattering and murmuring” (217). Martha finds herself confined not only by the indifferent world itself (symbolized by omnipresent clouds, rain, and surrounding plains) but also by a mass of people negligent of her happiness—a perspective that recalls her earlier conversation with Jan, in which she dismisses his suggestion to allow those around her a chance to give her happiness, choosing instead to revel in the fantasy of an unpopulated seaside overrun with flowers. However, following her mother’s death, Martha stops looking to escape her homeland, “this crude, landlocked place where the sky has no horizon” (217). Instead, she decides to take another path, the path of existential rebellion and the renunciation of the absolute. She resolves to stay put—to begrudgingly accept the limits of the absurd world—and to keep her eyes on earth instead of turning to illusion.
Insensitivity: Blindness and Deafness
The motifs of blindness and deafness—and their implied opposites, recognition and attention— illustrate The Tragedy of Miscommunication and the Importance of a Common Language. They primarily signify figurative insensitivity to others and withdrawal from the world into the self.
The Mother’s insensitivity to Jan betrays her despairing withdrawal from life. Out of habit, she avoids looking at him when he arrives, saying: “I can’t see well, and I didn’t give him a good look. I know from experience that it’s better not to look at them. It’s easier to kill what you don’t recognize” (150). In averting her eyes, she avoids seeing him as human. Her poor eyesight only makes it easier to turn away from him. The motif of poor eyesight reappears when Maria questions how Jan’s mother didn’t immediately recognize him. Jan attributes this to her poor eyesight: It’s easier to bear this explanation than the thought that she has forgotten him—a definitive “no” to his question of whether he has, in his mother, an irrevocable home.
Sight metaphors also thematize the danger of believing it’s possible to fully understand the world. Evoking the traditional symbol of vision as rational understanding, Jan explains to Maria that he just wants to “see things a little clearer” (162). Here, clear vision means comprehension of his place in the world and the nature of his relationship with his mother and sister. Jan’s desire to “get [his] bearings” (160) and “figure out if these dreams make sense” (163) is, for Camus, impossible since an irrational world cannot be fully understood. The danger of thinking otherwise is reemphasized when Maria learns of Jan’s murder. The senselessness of the act leads her to declare “I’m blind now,” underscoring the idea that perfect vision is impossible because the absurd world defies reason (226).
Jan, Martha, Maria, and the Mother are all deaf to truths that threaten their illusions about the world. In his hope for perfect happiness, Jan deafens himself to Maria’s pleas to abandon his ill-conceived plan. In her abject despair, the Mother remains oblivious to Jan’s intimations of his identity. In the indifference necessary for her plans, Martha refuses to listen to Jan talk about emotion. Finally, following the revelation of Jan’s murder, Maria becomes insensate as Martha accosts her with the devastating truth of a world in which everyone remains unrecognized. Maria cries, “Oh, what do I care, I can barely hear you. My heart’s been ripped out and torn to shreds” (227). Each character deafens his or herself to truths that appear unbearable: Jan that he has no home, Martha that she has a responsibility to others, the Mother that world-renunciation isn’t the answer to absurdity, and Maria that Jan’s death is no surprise in a world lacking inherent reason.
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