The Meursault Investigation: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

Mama is so old that she looks like her own grandmother. She’s living in “a kind of institution”—in other words, her own tiny house, where she’s hunkered down like a piece of luggage. When Harun sees her, he imagines that she embodies “an assembly of ancestors” judging him or wanting to know if she’s found a wife. Neither Harun nor his mother know how old they are—before Independence, people relied on landmark events rather than calendars to tell time.

Harun rarely visits Mama. She spends all her time sweeping every corner of her house in Hadjout in order to erase “the secret” through which Harun made “the definitive leap into manhood.” Harun spent the second half of his childhood in Hadjout before he went to Algiers to learn land administration. Both he and Mama wanted to be far away from the ocean.

When they leave Algiers after Musa’s death, Harun and Mama stay with an uncle who treats them badly, consigning them to a shack and then eventually kicking them out. From there they move to a commercial French farm where Mama works as a maid and Harun is a chore boy.

It is a troubled time, but their problems are from “hunger,” not “injustice.” Epidemics and famines are frequent, and if one of Harun’s playmates doesn’t appear in the morning, Harun knows that he is dead. Harun is often afraid, especially of the men who come around the house at night, knowing Mama has no man to take care of her. He tries to watch over her.

After years of strategizing, Mama finds a way to improve their life in Hadjout. She finds a job as a housekeeper and “waited, with me perched on her back, for Independence.” Her employers are a French family, Monsieur and Madame Larquais, who flee quickly after the war, and Mama and Harun are able to appropriate the house for themselves. The house has three rooms, some sheds, and a courtyard.

However, in the years while Mama works for the settlers, things are very hard. Harun has to walk miles each day to find work as a farm laborer, competing with other workers to get there first—one day he’s so hungry he punctures another worker’s bicycle tires so that he can show up first.

Now, Mama keeps the house very dark. Harun visits every few months, drinks some coffee, and leaves without saying much to his mother. Almost nothing has changed in Hadjout except for the construction of a few new buildings, and the fact that everyone seems completely idle.

In response to an unheard question, Harun says fiercely that he’s not nostalgic for French Algeria. However, before Independence, “we Arabs gave the impression that we were waiting, not going around in circles like today.” The village has grown larger but has become less orderly.

Harun doesn’t like Hadjout, and he dreads returning there to bury Mama. It’s also puzzling for another reason—Meursault’s mother is also supposedly buried in Hadjout, but no one knows where, and no one has been able to find the gravestone or the old people’s home he mentions in his book. It’s possible that her grave was uprooted in the chaos after Independence, but it’s also possible that Meursault lied about his origins in order to make himself more sympathetic to his readers.

Harun says that he could reveal the “secret” he and Mama have—the fact that one night in Hadjout, “the moon obliged me to finish the job your hero began in the sun.” However, he decides to leave the revelation for another day; he’s not sure if the interlocutor is trustworthy.

While Harun and Mama are still living in Algiers, Mama “convert[s] her anger” into a prolonged period of mourning that wins her sympathy and respect in the neighborhood. Because of her grief, she is allowed to go out and work without arousing suspicious of immodesty. Harun rarely sees her, since she spends most of her time wandering the city trying to investigate Musa’s death.

Musa’s funeral doesn’t take place for forty days, because the police refuse to return his body or even admit to possessing it. Not only is Musa dead, he has “vanished.” Mama sees the picture of his murderer, Meursault, in the paper, but she doesn’t understand anything about him personally—he’s just “the spitting image of all the colonists who’d grown fat on so many stolen harvests.”

As she questions the neighbors, the police, and Musa’s friends, Mama’s mourning becomes “a surprising comedy, a marvelous act she put on and refined until it became a masterpiece.” She wants the neighbors to sympathize with Harun, but she herself is rarely affectionate towards him. Harun feels that he is “the dead brother,” while Mama is always ready for Musa to come home and claim his daily coffee. Harun feels “guilty for being alive” but also responsible for watching over his mother.

After forty days, the imam declares Musa drowned and carries out the proper rituals for a funeral when nobody is present. Afterwards, Harun huddles in bed while the neighbor women comfort Mama. Eventually, Mama wraps her arms around Harun, but he knows “it’s Musa she wants to find there, not me.”

Mama develops strange rituals, like visiting the hammam (public bath) and the mosque as often as possible. In fact, Mama has had a hard life—she grew up outside of Algiers but had to leave her tribe to marry a man who abandoned her. Now she’s “twice widowed” and reduced to working for foreigners. Harun loves her, but he’s “never forgiven her” for the way she behaved towards him in his youth. At the time, he felt like she was punishing him for refusing to die like Musa.

Periodically, Mama becomes convinced that she’s found Musa’s body or heard his footsteps outside. Harun hates Mama’s fantasies, and it’s this that pushes him to learn French, a language that “could serve as a barrier” between them. Mama expresses her grief in “rich” and volatile language, but as soon as Harun is able to obtain some books and education, he learns to speak in a different way. French allows him to “organize the world with my own words.”

Harun orders the interlocutor to get another round of drinks. Returning to his tale, he explains that he eventually gained admission to a school in Hadjout, which helped him distance himself from Mama’s overbearing grief. He feels fine at school or on the farms where he works, but when he returns home he feels like he’s “stepping into a grave.” It seems that Mama and Musa are both waiting for him and wondering why he hasn’t spent the day “sharpening the knife of our family’s vengeance.”

Now, Harun is “indifferent” to the fact that his mother is still alive. She rarely speaks anymore, perhaps because there’s nothing left of Musa to mourn. All Harun can remember is “the way she would crawl inside my skin” and her frequent bursts of angry passion. He offers to take the interlocutor to her funeral.

Harun remarks that it’s getting dark. He hates the silence of night, because it awakens his memory. He encourages the interlocutor to have another drink, and points out the “bottle ghost,” who is here again. He always sits at the other end of the bar. Harun warns the interlocutor not to turn around, lest the bottle ghost “vanish.”