Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation is far more than a
rereading or spin-off of Camus’s The Stranger. Daoud renders the invisible, nameless trauma of
Musa’s murder in Camus’s famous novel as the structuring absence of a new story. This new
story speaks to us much more universally about the importance of making the anonymous
suffering of those without a history or narrative (e.g., Musa’s death) our own, and gives us a
powerful new vision of the absurd that is philosophically grounded in seeing ourselves in the
passivity, isolation, and nonexistence of the Other. The absurd thus becomes for Daoud not just a
metaphysical paradox, but a productive means of reckoning with the unknowability of ourselves
through each other, of confronting the story of our shared historical past, the present, and the
possibilities for the future. In this way, then, Daoud’s “counter-investigation” reinhabits the
world of The Stranger to search for Musa’s unburied corpse well beyond the literary scene of the
crime—killed “the way one kills time” by Camus’s pen—in the hearts and minds of readers
themselves, where the language of conscience did not speak up (“the place where something
pure and ancient was lost”) and was instead swallowed up by awed silence. These readers were
(and still are!) perfectly willing to gloss over the death of “the Arab” as a mere incident needed
to illustrate a grand philosophical allegory. Focus on three or four passages from The Meursault
Investigation to analyze how Daoud’s novel turns the absurd into an ethical imperative to act—to
find and face ourselves in the nothingness (the unlived and the unspoken, what fate has cruelly
denied) of other human beings.