The Misunderstanding

The central conflict in The Misunderstanding is the disjunction between human desire and reality. Camus models this conflict after classical tragedy (See: Background). As in classical tragedy, the characters of The Misunderstanding are caught between their individual longings and an absurd world negligent to those hopes. Jan, Martha, Maria, and the Mother all long to return or escape to a world that will fulfill their individual longings. In pursuing a world tailor-made for his or herself, each opposes the negligence of an indifferent cosmos. Camus positions this tension as a conflict between two world orders: the sacred, which is infused with immutable meaning, and the absurd, which is devoid of sense. In this context, he frames each character’s pursuit of meaning as tragic because they expect too much of the world. Jan longs for the immediate recognition that can only be found in the biblical parable of the Prodigal Son; the Mother longs for a world where meaning can’t deteriorate over time; Maria longs first to return to a life her husband was dissatisfied with, and then to escape to a world without tragedy; and Martha longs to escape with her Mother to perfect freedom by the seaside.

Throughout The Misunderstanding, the search for meaning and the search for home are one and the same. For all the characters (except the Old Servant), home is a refuge of security in an otherwise indifferent world. Their folly is not in searching for a home, but in believing this home can be immutable and irrevocable, that it can endure without maintenance and be categorically safe from decay. Camus frames the absurd world as entropic; loci of meaning tend toward disintegration. After a 20-year absence, Jan finds his childhood home unrecognizable. Once happy in Africa with Jan, Maria finds herself exiled from that home by his dissatisfaction. Once certain that “crime was the hearth around which [she and her mother] were forever united,” Martha finds herself abandoned by the one person in whom she found meaning (225). Once secure in the refuge of familial love, the Mother finds that time has estranged her, in one way or another, from her husband, her son, and her daughter. Each character longs for the unassailable meaning of a perfect world, but each encounters instead cosmic indifference. Each longs for an absolute power to safeguard meaning, but each finds a world absent such power.

Despite the absence of such an omnipotent power, Martha, Maria, and the Mother each read fate into the events that befall them which, Camus suggests, is not divine preordainment but absurd logic. Martha explains Jan’s murder as a natural occurrence in a world in which “no one’s ever recognized” (227). Through this explanation, Camus voices the necessity of acknowledging that things happen that defy understanding. This absurdity, he asserts, is the order of things. As Martha states: “it’s now that everything’s in order, and it’s of that you [Maria] must be convinced” (227). When Maria confesses her conviction that Jan’s plan could only end in tragedy, Camus illustrates that such fatalism is correct, but only to an extent. Much of the world is beyond human control, but people can still assert their will in limited ways. 

While both Maria and Martha assert that Jan’s murder was inevitable, Camus frames this inevitability not as the product of preordainment but of Jan’s stubbornness in asserting his will against the absurd world. While Martha expresses one extreme—the fatalism that one cannot contravene the order of the world—Jan expresses the other: that one can mold the world to one’s will. In this hubris, Jan resembles the tragic figure Oedipus from Greek myth. Just as Oedipus rejects the prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother—and consequently secures that very fate—Jan believes he can exempt himself from the order of the world. While Oedipus’s hubris is his attempt to circumvent divine fate, Jan’s hubris is his belief that he doesn’t have to identify himself as anyone else would, contravening the world order described by Martha in which “no one’s ever recognized” (227).

The tragic irony of Jan’s death is that the question of whether he has a home is resolved in his room at the inn—just not in the way he hoped. Despite realizing the inn is no longer his home and that his mother and sister won’t recognize him unless he identifies himself, Jan persists in his search for a refuge of meaning. His final words before falling unconscious are “[y]es or no?” (202). Jan dies with his uncertainty unresolved, oblivious to the conspicuous answer the absurd world delivers. Unlike Oedipus, he doesn’t survive and reconcile himself to the order he once opposed. In contrast, the rebel Martha—Camus’s tragic hero—does recognize this answer. She declares to Maria: “[Jan] 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” (227). Martha’s unequivocal statement represents a more extreme perspective than Camus’s own philosophy: For him, the world doesn’t provide an irrevocable refuge of meaning safeguarded by some absolute power, but one can still construct a sense of meaning in collaboration with others.