How the priest changed Meursault's view of life and death

Main idea: Through his conversation with the chaplain, Mersault sees death in a new way and in turn transforms his views toward the subject of life.

Immediately after being sentenced to death, we see Mersault struggling with hopes of escaping his death and soon despairing about the absolute certainty of his death: "I could see that the trouble with the guillotine was that you had no chance at all, absolutely none" (111). At this point, his fear of death causes him to hold negative views on both life and death: “But everybody knows life isn’t worth living…Whether it was now or twenty years from now, I would still be the one dying” (114). Here he claims that life isn’t worth living because he will eventually die anyway–in other words, death is an agent that makes life meaningless. Along a similar idea, he says “I understood very well that people would forget me when I was dead. They wouldn’t have anything more to do with me.” (114-115). Here, Mersault thinks that death destroys the traces that one leaves behind in their life through personal relationships and therefore degrades the value of life.  

However, after his conversation with the priest, Mersault holds a more positive view toward both life and death.

<Life>

During his conversation with the priest, Mersault is triggered to explicitly reject the sense of false hope given by the idea of religious salvation and accept the certainty of his death: “He [the chaplain] wasn’t even sure he was alive, because he was living a dead man…But I was sure about me, about everything, surer than he could ever be, sure of my life and sure of the death I had waiting for me.” Here, see Mersault not only becoming more certain of his death but channeling death as a way to bring meaning to life: the knowledge of death is the very source of "aliveness" of life and thus rejecting death would mean "living a dead man". We further see Mersault advancing this to the logic that, since death is a condemnation, life is a “privilege” (121). Therefore, at the very end, Mersault comes to feel happy that he was able to live his life, contrary to his initial view that life isn't worth living: "I felt that I had been happy" (123).

<Death>

Ok, now, we understand how Mersault comes to believe that death adds value to life. Still, we don’t have a complete explanation for why Mersault suddenly became so calm about death itself after talking to the priest. To find out why, we should first ask “why did Mersault not want to die, even if he had been so committed to the idea that things don’t matter since the beginning of the book?”. We can see a part of the reason why he fears death in a quote I introduced earlier: “I understood very well that people would forget me when I was dead. They wouldn’t have anything more to do with me. I wasn’t even able to tell myself that it was hard to think those things” (114-115). Mersault fears that death would lead others to forget him. Deeper down, this implies that Mersault attributes a part of the value of his life to how others see him. Throughout the earlier parts of the book, we see this as a trend, such as when Mersault tries to keep a good relationship with his lawyer: “I wanted things between us to be good" (66).

However, Mersault comes to lower his fear of death once he realizes that the value of his life doesn't come from others, and therefore being forgotten by the world after his death isn't something to fear. This inflection point comes in the middle of Mersault's rant at the priest:

“what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we’re all elected by the same fate…What would it matter if he [the chaplain] were accused of murder and then executed because he didn’t cry at his mother’s funeral?... Salamano’s dog was worth just as much as his wife” (121)

Here, Mersault claims that, as everyone is subject to the same fate in the face of death, no one else is more entitled* than him to determine the value of his life or had the right to judge him as a monster who “didn’t cry at his mother’s funeral”. Instead, what actually determines the value of his life comes from what he experienced in his life (going back to having felt "happy" in his life), just like how Old Salamano valued his diseased dog (which society might value merely as a filthy animal) as much as his human wife. In this way, after arguing with the priest, Mersault feels much calmer as he becomes more comfortable with departing from a “world that now and forever meant nothing to me” (122). In addition, Meursault sees this departure as an act of gaining freedom while he reflects on Maman: "I felt as if I understood why at the end of her life she had taken a 'fiance', why she had played at beginning again... So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again" (123). Here, he comes to believe that death liberates one from the social ties that they had in their life and allows them to start another life. Hence, Mersault learns that accepting that one would be forgotten by others after their death, rather than praying for spiritual salvation or a chance of escaping death, is the true act of hope for a better life.

*As a note, at the beginning of the novel, Mersault did hold a similar view that humans are equal. For example, he says to his boss that “in any case one life was as good as another” (41). However, he starts to feel disempowered to determine the value of his own life as he undergoes the justice system, where he is perpetually silenced and criticized under the label of a “criminal”.