Frank Meursault
By Georgia Christgau
It was March and Frank Koenig's five years of high school were almost over. He
would have already passed his oral defense if he hadn't stopped going to mentoring
meetings, so he was assigned a new mentor: me. The other student I'd been assigned to
was a supersenior too. Taliyah, who I loved and respected for her writing talent, had also
missed several meetings, thinking I'd understand. I did, until one Wednesday I found her
sitting in the cafeteria with her friend Leticia when she should have been with me. Two
could play that game: the next week I went where I was supposed to go and graded
papers instead. Our chemistry had failed to bring Taliyah and I to this proud moment,
when a senior defends her academic work before a panel of teachers -- something we'd
talked about her doing since she was in tenth grade. We were both bummed out, stuck.
Frank's failed relationship with a different mentor was another mystery. I didn't ask. I felt
I owed him that much if we were to really start fresh. Just as I was Frank's second
chance, he also was mine.
At our first meeting Frank's eager to discuss Albert Camus' The Stranger, which
he in the fall during his final English class with another teacher. The essay he's written,
which we'll copy for his oral defense panel of three staff members along with two final
projects from other subjects, required that he connect Camus to existentialism to Freud,
with a little abstract expressionism thrown in. He received a B+ for his effort. The paper
is a puddle of received ideas, and as he reads the enthusiasm drains from his face.
Meursault, the main character, "rejects social norms"; when pressed Frank can substitute
"behavior" for "norm," but doesn't know what to make of "social behavior." Meursault
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"accepts consequences of his actions," but also is "oblivious to consequences." I tell
Frank Meursault is confused, or perhaps he is; the trick is knowing the difference. He
smiles, releasing himself from the grip of nervous expectation with which I suspect he
dragged himself here. When I suggest that Meursault is an anti-hero who defies authority
and gets screwed by the system, he looks up and replies, "Not by the system. Screwed by
himself." Now we're talking. I haven't read The Stranger in three years, and I've never
taught it. Can two people who love a book figure it out together? I decided to find out.
The oral defense is about whether or not the kid can hold his own in an adult
dialogue for which his work has been the catalyst. For our second meeting, I've asked
Frank to bring a draft of a cover letter that will introduce him and his work to the panel,
which will also include his research paper on free speech for American History and three
short pieces relating to his internship as a computer maven. If you ask me, the difference
between an oral defense being a two-hour ordeal and a memorable conversation turns on
the quality of the cover letter. An honest reflection that ties together the work, the kid,
his past and his future, all in one document can be confidence boosting. A sentimental
piece of hyperbole is easier to write, but useless. Frank's first draft is something in
between. It begins,
"During mentoring, I've been forced to look back on my high school experiences,
the beginning, the middle, then the huge mountain I had to climb over, to come to
now, the future ending. Though I've felt overcome a lot through these 4+ years of
high school, I am not completely content with the mistakes I've done and the time
that I have wasted. If only I was smarter at the time to deny the pressures of city
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teenage life and take into account of the things I would benefit from, which I know
now, are my education and the rest of my days. I feel I should be looking forward
and into my future, than looking back on, what I feel, has been a fair high school
experience."
I comb through the first draft carefully, stealing clues. I feel like a detective who's
broken into a suspect's apartment to locate crucial evidence I know is there. We're not
going to work on revising this letter now, because I don't know Frank well enough yet. I
don’t' see much in his draft at first, except some unusual phrasing, so I look at that again.
Frank's juxtapositions -- "future ending," "not content with the mistakes I've done," hint
at a larger, underlying contradiction between his feeling of accomplishment at having
"overcome a lot," and the almost indifferent summing up of his "4+" years as "a fair high
school experience." His contrite tone also contrasts with his resistance; I wince at the
phrase "forced to look back" in line one. When the oral defense feels like a chore, it's no
good. But by the end of the first paragraph, when he argues that as a senior he should be
looking ahead, I wonder if he isn't right.
What breaks the static of the humdrum of the working day varies from teacher to
teacher. It's two things for me: when a student gets what reading is about, or when she
writes something she knows is good. This is me, happy: I sit at my desk. A student's work
is up on the monitor and we sit side by side, staring at it. My hands tuned to the keyboard,
I smile devilishly, turn to her and say, "I'll drive." We'll get to the cover letter -- later.
Most of our review for the oral defense focuses on writing Frank will not revise,
such as the Camus paper, which presses down on Meursault, as if belittling him would
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make him easier to understand; yet in conversation, he had called Meurseault
"fascinating." In the cover letter draft, Frank -- who, I've discovered, is quite bright, and
willing to stay late when talk about books runs over his alloted mentoring time -attempts to pull a similar gag about himself: "If only I was smarter to deny the pressure of
city teenage life." Frank is plenty smart, quite proud, and I don't believe this sentence for
a minute. I suspected that someone had told him that anyone who takes five years to
graduate has no one to blame but himself; like the ideas about Meursault in his his paper,
his sense of his own failure was received.
The draft continued, "In my sophomore-junior year, I felt a separation between
my family and a disconnection in my life. I was introduced to a brand new lifestyle I
thought I would never experience, and knowing this, I didn't like it, even until this day."
The pattern of juxtapositions -- "a brand new lifestyle" that "I didn't like" -- was
intentional. His odd word pairings scrambled the past. But it wasn't a secret. He'd written
about his father's alcoholism in a tenth grade career education course. The paper was in
his portfolio, a collection of work that student and mentor go through to select the end-ofsequence projects for the oral defense, that I read late one afternoon. "[My father] didn't
care about what he was doing and I didn't know what was happening," he wrote. "This
interfered with my school time because I cared about my father more than school at the
time." His teacher had been my good friend Melanie. She'd since left the school, but she
still remembered Frank: polite, cooperative, and very, very quiet. Her department was
updating its internship manual, and he'd offered to retype it. It was 225 pages long. When
he finished, fellow students renamed it "Frank's book." On impulse, I invited her to be
part of his panel and she agreed. If he'd trusted anyone during that painful year, she
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would have been a good candidate. Now that he was almost 19 and ready to graduate, he
was practiced at forgetting what he didn't want to remember. As his mentor, I was okay
with him doing this, as long as he understood it was a conscious decision. There was an
existential value here, and it was my intention to honor it through a deeper reading of The
Stranger: the power of individual choice in determining the course of one's life.
I brought two copies of the novel to our next meeting, hoping Meursault would
join us. I pictured him as a cross between Edward G. Robinson and Roman Polanski, an
outrageous little man who, moments before he is to face the firing squad, blows off the
priest sent in to hear his last confession by equating man's need for God with the
importance of swimming fast. I admit that my theory that Meursault was screwed by the
system was wrong, or at least incomplete, and Frank and I start over with Part One. We
could say, as Frank did, that Meursault "didn't really care" about his mother's death, or
that "it seemed to others as if he didn't really care," as I added, attempting to stretch
Frank's thinking. We agree that Meursault is, at least, a maddening protagonist who
neither defends his actions nor accepts society's punishment for them. He has murdered
someone though, that's clear.
"To me, Frank, it's like this: if you feel sorry for Meursault you're agreeing with
Camus, and if you could care less about Meursault you're not swayed by Camus'
argument - whatever that is."
"Yeah, I guess," says Frank tentatively.
"So which are you? A sympathizer?" I mean, do you think Meursault got shafted
in his trial, for instance?"
"Well," Frank continues, "they brought up how he acted at his mother's funeral
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like it was abnormal, him not showing emotions and stuff."
"And?"
"They said he drank coffee when he should have been talking to his mother's
friends."
"He fell asleep, too."
"Yeah, that wasn't supposedly proper behavior. But that didn't have nothing to do
with it."
"With what?"
"What he was on trial for."
"Oh -- you mean killing the Arab on the beach?"
"Yeah. But even that was weird. He couldn't explain himself. It was like he
blamed the whole thing on the weather. 'The sun got in my eyes,' that sort of thing. They
felt he showed no remorse."
"What does that prove?"
"Nothing. Just because you don't show feelings, doesn't mean you don't have
them."
Frank negotiates this triple negative with ease. It's something he is sure of,
because he has lived it. He's also found what had gotten lost in his written assignment:
empathy. Now the panel will understand the difference, too.
Rereading The Stranger, I find the trial scenes so compelling that I feel like
defending the guy myself. But it will do no good to rant about injustice again. I tell Frank
that maybe I'm confused, or Meursault is confused, and the trick is knowing the
difference. (Or maybe I, a teacher, identify with the system and Frank, a student,
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identifies with the victim.) Meursault is guilty, but that's not the point. Neither is his
longing for freedom while awaiting the gallows proof that he's sorry. The lesson of The
Stranger is that there is no lesson. All we have in life is choices; without religion or any
other reliable construct, each individual man is autonomous, and yet freedom is no
guarantee of happiness, as Meursault's tragic predicament attests.
Not being a believer in God myself took some doing. I was raised in a
Presbyterian church and attended services until the first year after I finished college. My
pastor asked me when my boyfriend and I were getting married, thinking he would
prompt us to acknowledge our secret. When we decided to live together openly instead,
we were asked to leave the church. We never married. Our relationship outlasted our
Christianity and we never looked back. Options I never knew existed when I was
religious were followed by a time of darkness while I figured out what to do with myself
now that I could no longer turn to beliefs such as "sin" and "God's forgiveness."
Frank's time of darkness followed that awful year in tenth grade, after his parents
divorced. Neither one of them seemed to care what happened to him. He made his home
in the school cafeteria instead. Ralph Padron was there, with guitar. That year Ralphy
had transferred from another larger school to our small one, but the one-on-one attention
he was getting didn't seem to be helping; he would drop out the next year. Ralphy taught
Frank how to play guitar, then Frank taught himself bass. I imagined that the only kids he
related to as things fell apart at home were independents like Ralph. Constructing his own
family, Frank grew closer to his aunt and her boyfriend. He started teaching himself how
to play the piano. Even so, as recently as January -- two months before we'd met -- he'd
come close to dropping out.
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One of Frank's favorite parts in The Stranger occurs when Meursault, about to die,
says he understands why his mother, who's taken a boyfriend, "played at making a fresh
start." (p. 154) Frank also learned about change. As he grew taller and the students in his
classes got younger, he decided to make up a high school course by taking a harder class
at the community college across the street. There, at the same time, for internship credit,
he worked 12 hours a week with a small staff at its information center setting up data
bases. Most of them young men, they accepted Frank as more of an equal, and he found
them "friendly, helpful, not strict, social, and still got their work done." This was from the
set of three documents we were also using in the oral defense, and Frank's maturation
through his internship became central to our presentation. In his cover letter, he write that
he had looked forward to seeing them: "finally, in my fifth year, I wanted to go to
school." It was likely that one effect of the tragedy he'd lived through was that he'd
decided growing up wasn't such a good idea. No wonder identifying with adults came late
to Frank, and was so liberating.
I open a file and begin typing up my feedback. Frank is ready to rewrite his cover
letter with the funny language. I write:
"Line 6. 'Not content with the mistakes I've done...' Well, duh. Of course you're
not content with the mistakes. But you probably mean something else which you
haven't yet said. Maybe it's that although you've finally reached your last semester
in high school, you feel somewhat embarrassed etc. about past mistakes. Which
you don't have to say, either, by the way."
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"Line 10. [The last line] The is the best line in paragraph one. Why should you be
looking back, after all, when it's hard for you? If you feel you 'should be looking
forward,' are you? Some back and forth is necessary at points of transition in life - maybe you could describe what 'a fair high school experience is' more... Do you
mean that, on average, based on your peers and your own history, you've had a
pretty typical high school experience? This also connects to what you say are
'pressures of city teenage life' (line 8) Again, this might take you into
uncomfortable territory, but if your experience has been 'fair,' do you mean to
include both ups and downs? I can explain this more to you in person if you don't
understand what I'm asking."
"Line 14. 'introduced to a brand new lifestyle; sounds good, but I'm pretty sure
you mean not good, as in, again, I don't want to talk about it. I'd change this
phrase. Maybe you're skirting the issue of an unexpected bad situation at home,
and I could probably help you write about this without actually going into detail. I
think you have something important to say here, actually two things: that you've
been through a lot, and you don't want to talk about it. I'd like you to keep both
ideas in your final draft of this reflection."
Frank takes in all I've said with a maturity that's impressive. We meet again to
rewrite. He's found his voice. He begins:
"Looking back on my high school experience, I have to admit I'd much
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rather be looking ahead. The future is what's to come; the past doesn't change.
It's already over and there's nothing you can do about it. What happens after high
school is my decision, and that's what I look forward to. At the same time, I'm
pretty happy to be presenting these pieces to you today for my oral defense. I got
through high school largely because of my decision to stick with it, even though it
took longer than I planned."
Frank's oral defense was the memorable kind; Melanie, reflecting on the
withdrawn boy she used to know, told me, "I felt like he was all there." No one who slogs
through high school and graduates with a smile as Frank did has as much in common
with Camus' anti-hero as I'd like to think -- who in the end is cured by his "blind rage,"
because it "rid [him] of hope." But at the same time Meursault sees the "benign
indifference" of the universe; and perhaps, accepts that not all the injustice of the world is
intentional. Should we, to see clearly, accept the limits of reality and resist them at the
same time? I think so. Frank had not planned to attend graduation, but in the end he went
anyway, joined by his aunt, her boyfriend, and his mother. The last line of his cover letter
read, "College is definitely in my future… I'm over the first hurdle of high school
graduation, and nothing can stop me." Sure we'd chased out the other cliches, but this one
stayed. After all, he'd convinced me, it was true.
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