DE Weekly: Camus, Absurdism, & A Happy Death
Below is an archived email originally sent on February 16, 2026.
Camus, Absurdism, & A Happy Death
When one thinks of existentialism, one of the first authors to come to mind is likely to be Albert Camus. Two of his works in particular––his novel The Stranger and his book-length essay The Myth of Sisyphus––are undoubtedly his best known works. However, there is another novel of his I’ll be writing about today: A Happy Death.
A Happy Death is, in many ways, the classic Camus novel. Replete with beautifully written, endlessly quotable passages, wondrous highs and desperate lows, it is an enjoyable read, like many of his books.
It is also strikingly similar to The Stranger; indeed, it is often thought to be either a precursor to that novel, an early variation, or a throwaway draft of the same story.
It features the same protagonist, Patrice Meursault, centers on the same location in Algeria, and the story’s progression and ending are evocative of each other.
However, A Happy Death never reached the same acclaim as did The Stranger. Perhaps this owes to it being posthumously published in 1971, years after Camus had died. Perhaps it owes to the way it was assembled, that it might not have been a final draft. Perhaps Camus himself never intended to publish it.
Before I dive into the story, I will give my two cents on the matter: while I did enjoy it, I don’t view A Happy Death as Camus’s strongest novel. After all, it was his first; he was young and focused on other novels to come, and I think The Stranger is a stronger novel in almost every way.
That being said, there is still so much to take from it. So, let’s jump into A Happy Death…
The book opens with Meursault walking into the home of a cripple named Zagreus and shooting him in the head to stage a suicide.
After doing so, he walks away thinking, “In this flowering of air, this fertility of the heavens, it seemed as if a man’s one duty was to live and be happy” (7). We then jump back in time before this event to start the second chapter, all the while thinking: why did Meursault find happiness in death?
Meursault does not enjoy life fully, as he feels he should. He cared for his sick mother for ten years while she deteriorated, putting his own life on hold for her. He became accustomed to depression and to poverty, simply going through the motions:
“The dreary furnishing . . . did not exist for him: habit had blurred everything. He moved through the ghost of an apartment that required no effort of him . . . He wanted to diminish the surface he offered the world, to sleep until everything was consumed” (16).
He is unable even to find happiness in love. His lover Marthe’s past upsets him, as he finds himself consumed with jealousy over her past lovers (one of whom is the cripple Zagreus).
Meursault overcomes this jealousy to some extent by forming an unlikely friendship with Zagreus, however, visiting him to keep him company and mull over the profound questions of life.
“I don’t know what to do,” Meursault tells Zagreus during one of their talks. “I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L’Illustration. Something desperate, you know” (36).
Zagreus tells Meursault he is living the wrong way not being thankful of all these things, but confides that he sometimes wonders how he can justify living as an amputee stuck inside all day, and how difficult life can be.
Yet he remarks, “I’d accept even worse––blind, dumb, anything, as long as I feel in my belly that dark fire that is me, me alive. The only thing that would occur to me would be to thank life for letting me burn on” (38).
As it turns out, Zagreus did eventually lose that burning desire to live.
What leads Meursault to murder Zagreus is his pleading with him to do so. He views his life, paralyzed and in pain, as futile; however, he cannot bring himself to commit suicide. So he asks Meursault to do the deed. In exchange, Meursault can have his money and start a new life.
When Marthe learns of Zagreus’s apparent suicide, she tells Meursault, “But sometimes it takes more courage to live than to shoot yourself” (54).
Meursault takes the money, boards a boat for Marseilles, then writes to Marthe that he is taking a job in Central Europe to start over.
Symbolically, he is killing himself––that is, his old life––to start anew; this is a sort of natural death for him.
Next comes his conscious death.
Meursault travels around Europe on his own, checking into hotels and spending time alone. “He was flooded by a dreadful pleasure at the prospect of so much desolation and solitude” (59).
He can only take so much of that, though, as he eventually catches a red eye train out of Prague and makes his way back to Algiers. He spends time with his female friends, affectionately referred to as the “girls,” or “his children.”
He does mundane things each day and feels happy. Eventually, he buys a house of his own, away from everyone else, and retreats back into solitude.
One of my favorite quotes from the novel, one that translates brilliantly from French into English (as so much of Camus does) is, “But now he realized that he had no one to meet tonight, nor tomorrow, nor ever, and that he was facing his longed-for solitude at last. From the moment he no longer had to see anyone, the next day seemed terribly imminent. Yet he convinced himself that this is what he had wanted: nothing before him but himself for a long time––until the end” (111).
What Meursault realizes in the depth of his solitude is this: he is still not happy. Everyone he knows tells him so, that he has not changed––and he realizes they are right.
In the final chapter, his health begins to deteriorate as he fights heart disease. Realizing that he does not have much time left, he begins to examine his life. It is finally in this situation that he finds peace. He tells his girlfriend Lucienne that he is not sad at the thought of dying.
To end the story, Meursault dies.
What is the point of this story? Did Meursault live a good life? Did he die happy?
I believe Camus would like us to think that yes, he did.
A Happy Death is a novel about just that: how to be happy with the life that you have lived and, when you die, to be able to reflect on your deathbed about how it can be a happy event.
It’s a philosophical look at the “will to happiness,” how one can overcome the mundane and the minute in life and die a happy death.
Although similar to the ending of The Stranger, the Meursault in this story dies peacefully and is able to come to peace with the life that he lived.
He saw a world that was absurd: nothing he did was for himself or for a greater meaning in the first chapter of his life; in the second chapter, it all was. What Meursault did was what so many of us try to do: he constructed his own meaning in his own life.
Rather than look for meaning elsewhere, he took it upon himself to ensure that his life did have meaning.
Albeit by unconventional means, Meursault was able to pursue a life that he could live authentically. One that he could live and die for without regret, accepting the fullness of his life with full awareness.
For the first novel that Camus ever started writing, we see in this story the groundwork of his entire philosophy: courageous confrontation of the absurd, defiance on the level of the individual, and a revolt against the purported meaninglessness of life. For a novel that he might not have intended to publish, I would say he did pretty well.
Let us all try to live a happy death.
“For he had played his part, fashioned his role, perfected man’s one duty, which is only to be happy. Not for long, no doubt . . . what did it matter if he existed for two or twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed” (149).
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
This is one worth reading. I thought a return to Camus, the central figure of existentialism, was long overdue. I know this newsletter was a bit longer than usual, but I hope you enjoyed this one.
For more content, follow @TheDailyExist on X. For other social links, click here.
I write this newsletter for free–I love sharing my thoughts with you all, and I’ll continue to do so for free. But if you like what I write and want to show your support, you can always click here to share a tip. Thanks for keeping me going–it’s much appreciated.