The Meursault Investigation: Chapter 12 Summary & Analysis

Harun thinks that love is “inexplicable.” He’s always puzzled by the way couples touch each other constantly, until they blur the edges between them. He doesn’t understand how they manage to forget that that they were born and will die separately. To Harun, love seems to be an “accommodation” to the harshness of life, rather than a “mystery.” For him, death causes the same impressions that love causes in others—“sensation that every life is precarious and absolute.” Actually, he says, he’s very scared of love and its ability to “devour” people.

Harun returns to the subject of Meriem, and their brief affair in 1963. He loved to look up from his depression and see her smiling at him. She made him feel that he could have had a peaceful life on a small piece of land somewhere, if only “Musa, Mama, and your hero” (Meursault) hadn’t already killed him.

Harun still remembers how beautiful Meriem was, especially her smile and her hair. However, even when he was with her, he felt that he could never possess her, as a “stranger” like him “possesses nothing.”

Harun tells the interlocutor to look around the city, which contains everything from Ottoman walls to colonial buildings to offices and roads built after Independence. Outside the city, Harun imagines, lies a “purgatory” inhabited by everyone who has died for Algeria or because of it. Harun asks the interlocutor if the “bottle ghost” is refusing to answer him. He says there’s a precise formula that can elicit a response, but he doesn’t know it yet.