“
Now we have complicated the question a little more by our analysis of freedom. The Outsider wants to be free; he doesn’t want to become a healthy-minded, once-born person because he declares such a person is not free. He is an Outsider because he wants to be free. And what characterizes the ‘bondage5 of the once-born? Unreality, the Outsider replies. So we can at least say that, whatever the Outsider wants to become, that new condition of being will be characterized by a perception of reality. And reality ?—what can the Outsider tell us about that? That is more difficult. We have got two distinct sets of answers. Let us try posing the question to various Outsiders, and compare their answers: So, our question: What is Reality?
Barbusse: Knowledge of the depths of human nature.
Wells: The Cinema sheet; man’s utter nothingness.
Roquentin: Naked existence that paralyses and negates the human mind.
Meursault: Glory. The Universe’s magnificent indifference. No matter what these stupid and half-real human beings do, the reality is serene and unchanging.
This is a fuller answer than the other three; we can follow it up by asking Meursault: And what of the human soul?
Meursault: Its ground is the same as that of the universe. Man escapes his triviality by approaching his own fundamental indifference to everyday life.
Hemingway too would give us some such answer. Ask him what he means by ‘reality’:
Krebs: The moment when you do ‘the one thing, the only thing’, when you know you’re not merely a trivial, superficial counter on the social chessboard.
Strowde: Ineffable. Unlivable. The man who has seen it is spoilt for everyday life.
”
”