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Meursault’s mother dies just before the beginning of the novel, but his relationship with her and her death is crucial to how others perceive Meursault. Other characters treat Meursault’s mother as the idea of a mother, not as an individual woman with her own thoughts and opinions. The novel itself provides almost no detail as to her personality, enhancing this effect. Because people are meant to hold special love and affection for their mothers, society reads the fact that Meursault moved his mother to a care home as him having antisocial disregard for his mother. In addition, in the eyes of society, the death of one’s mother should carry more weight than other deaths. Therefore, Meursault’s ostensibly dispassionate reaction to his mother’s death evokes horror from the court. Meursault’s relationship with his mother acts as a focal point that others project onto, treating it as a sign of a degenerate mind. This projection mirrors the way the novel portrays people as attempting to assign meaning to the meaningless. Meursault’s relationship with his mother signifies nothing about his murder of the Arab, as much as the court would like it to.
Nevertheless, it is clear that Meursault’s relationship with his mother had a tenderness to it. In French, Meursault always calls his mother “Maman” within his thoughts, which is the way children address their mothers in French, much like “Mama” or “Mommy” in English. Matthew Ward, who wrote the 1988 English translation, considered this detail so important to the novel that he kept the word “Maman” in his version instead of following previous translators’s use of “Mother,” which he felt changed the meaning. Even in his thoughts, Meursault refers to his mother in a way that suggests care in a childlike manner. One possible explanation for this unusual point of sentimentality in Meursault’s manner is that even Meursault has a tendency to assign meaning to the meaningless. The closer he gets to his execution, the more Meursault thinks of his mother, even deciding that she had come to the same conclusion as him about the absurdity of life before her death. However, he rarely talked to his mother in her last days, and we have no clues in the text as to her mental state. Meursault, believing that he and his mother share a philosophy, is thus another example of a comforting fiction, a childish story he tells himself.
