Okay if you read my last forum post on this book (edit: here's the link to my other post) I was noticing parallels between Raymond/Salamano and the unnamed woman in Raymond's story/Salamano's dog and I said that I'd revisit the topic if I had more thoughts on it later. Which I do. There are a lot of other things I could say about this book, but this is what my brain has latched onto, so....

Back in chapter 5 when Marie asks Meursault to marry her his response is to say that "it didn't make any difference to me and that we could if she wanted to" (41). Later in that same chapter we find out that Salamano got his dog because he was lonely after his wife died. Two quotes stood out to me in this moment between Meursault and Salamano.

First, "I told old Salamano that he could get another dog, but he was right to point out to me that he was used to this one" (44). Then "He's hadn't been happy with his wife, but he'd pretty much gotten used to her" (also pg 44). It seems to me that the dog and the wife in these quotes are interchangeable: Salamano isn't happy with the dog either, but he's used to having him around and lonely/aimless now the dog is gone. In the final chapter of the book we literally get the statement "Salamano's dog was worth just as much as his wife" (121)! Salamano needs a person or animal to fill the role of companion so that he doesn't get lonely, and he doesn't care much about the specifics of who fills that role or whether or not either of them are happy.

This relates back to the marriage conversation between Marie and Meursault: "She wanted to know if I would have accepted the same proposal from another woman, with whom I was involved in the same way. I said, "Sure"" (42). One one level it seems obvious that if he truly had the exact same relationship with another woman as he has with Marie then yes of course his answer to her proposal would also be the same, and on initially reading this chapter that's how it assumed Meursault interpreted the question. BUT I don't think that's what Marie is really asking. Immediately followed by the stuff about Salamano's wife and dog the way that it is, I take this to be a question of whether Meursault's interest in her (if we can call it that) is about her specifically in any way, or just about filling a role in his life that could also be filled by another woman or even, in Salamano's case, a dog.

So, do we get answer to Marie's real question? Honestly, I'm not sure. On the one hand, Marie does seem to be an interchangeable person filling a role in Meursault's life, just like his other interpersonal attachments. We get quotes like when he is in prison and thinks "I was tormented by my desire for a woman... I never thought specifically of Marie. But I thought much about a woman, about women" (77). On the other hand, I do think there's something different about Meursault's relationship with Marie and the other very possessive relationships we see between Raymond and the unnamed woman or Salamano and his dog/wife in which the subjective experience and personhood of the other person/animal does not matter to the man involved. My main evidence for this comes during the trial when Meursault states "it took me a few minutes to understand the last part because he kept saying "his mistress" and to me she was Marie" (99). To me this is an acknowledgement of Marie's personhood and that the specificity of her being Marie does matter -- she's not simply an object filling a role. The very last mention of Marie in this book is "What did it matter that Marie now offered her lips to a new Meursault?" (121-122). This positions Meursault too as interchangeable in his inhabiting a role in Marie's life. Perhaps framing his own existence in this way too, instead of seeing himself as an autonomous subject and others as objects (as I would argue Raymond and Salamano do in their own ways) puts Meursault and Marie on more of an equal standing than the other men and women in this story.

I also find it interesting that when the chaplain talks to him about seeing a "divine face" (aka the face of God) in the stones of the prison wall what we get from Meursault is "the face I was looking for was as bright as the sun and the flame of desire--and it belonged to Marie. I had searched for it in vain" (119). Does he see Marie in someway as representing his salvation? I don't quite know what to make of this quote in context of the others, but I find it stands out to me that the closest we get to religion from Meursault is the face of the woman he supposedly does not love and a mention of the sun, which is the entity he blames for making him commit a murder.

I don't think this is the main point of the book, necessarily. In fact I think this book would've been a perfect case study for my philosophy thesis project on amorality and I wish I had read it when I was in undergrad. But since I've been out of school for close to a decade and am writing this on pagebound purely for my own enjoyment I have decided to fixate on dogs and wives and the role of Marie in this novel.

If literally anyone read all this sorry for the long post and please let me know what you think!!