Embracing Existence: a second look at Albert Camus' A Happy Death

Embracing Existence: a second look at Albert Camus' A Happy Death

Albert Camus is a big figure in twentieth century literature and philosophy. His name synonymous with books that every angst ridden teenager worth their salt needs to have poking surreptitiously from his/her back pocket. Yet, amidst his more celebrated works, lies A Happy Death. It’s a short book (I’m a slow-ish reader and I polished it off on a during a lunch hour), but influential in Camus’ development, breaking ground for those aforementioned later works.

But therein lies the problem: it’s hard to read A Happy Death without thinking of The Stranger. Both have a French Algerian protagonist called Mersault, a man on a journey of existential self-discovery, and both involve a pointless murder. However, the Mersault of the earlier work is a bit more likeable than the indifferent Stranger and that makes me feel much more inclined to like and understand him.

The title points us towards the novels central theme, essentially, what makes a happy life? Mersault, working as an office clerk, gives it a try but comes up short. Through Marthe (Mersault's girlfriend) he meets the physically challenged but wealthy Zagreus, who explains that happiness can be found in wealth and all that it has to offer. Mersault reacts to this by killing Zagerus and stealing his fortune.

Shortly after killing Zagreus, Mersault becomes ill. An almost Raskolnikov-esque series of events unfold. He travels to a few different places aiming to find somewhere to comfortably settle down and find happiness, pursuing a kind of retirement from his previous unhappy life. He has money, has sex and smokes cigarettes, but ultimately ends up dissatisfied.

Through the protagonist's journey, Camus invites us to confront the complexities of finding purpose and contentment in a world marked by absurdity and mortality. I wonder how much of Camus’ own life is in those pages.

A Happy Death contains the same characteristic mix of optimism and pessimism that always drew me to Camus, with the familiar message and urge to live with happiness on your own terms. It fell short to Camus’s later work, although I don’t feel it is fair to judge an author’s early work by comparison to their later books, especially if said early work was a posthumously published manuscript that clearly Camus had not decided to publish at that time.