The Meursault Investigation: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

In order to make Mama pay attention to him, Harun used to hide or eat household supplies like bread or sugar. Young Harun enjoys watching her search for them and eventually collapse, wailing about her lost husband and son and the remaining boy who won’t help her.

One day, Mama forces Harun to go to the neighborhood mosque, where a young imam supervises unattended children. They get into a fight on the way, and Harun falls in the dust. When he  arrives at the mosque, the imam asks why he is dirty and crying. Harun doesn’t know what to say and he’s bored, so he accuses another child of beating him. From then on, he starts to grow up and becomes “deceitful.” In his first lie, he’s like Meursault—he commits a misdeed simply because he has nothing else to do.

Harun reflects that he never felt “Arab”—this is a classification imposed by white colonists. Growing up, he thought of himself as a Muslim and the French as roumis who would surely be forced out one day. The Algerians aren’t hostile toward the foreigners, they just avoid them and wait patiently for them to leave. Therefore, it’s impossible that Musa would’ve been angry enough to try to kill Meursault. The Algerians were so sure of the roumis’ departure that kids like Harun wandered through French neighborhoods deciding which houses they would claim after their inhabitants left. They intuited that Independence would come, but didn’t anticipate the violence involved.

Musa only became “the Arab” once he was viewed through Meursault’s eyes. Harun is still bothered by the question of how Musa ended up on the beach with Meursault, since it wasn’t one of his usual haunts. He gets dizzy thinking about “how a man could lose his name, plus his life, plus his own corpse” in one afternoon.

One of the reasons that Musa’s story is so gripping is that in some ways it’s everyone’s story—just going into the French part of the city and interacting with the French can cause immeasurable damage and loss.

The afternoon of his death, Musa was supposed to meet his friend Larbi. However, after the murder, Larbi never appeared—he fled the neighborhood in order to avoid the police. All that’s left is a brief mention of him in Meursault’s book.

There’s also the problem of the prostitute. Harun doesn’t like to talk about this much. It seems unnecessary for Meursault to allege falsely that Musa’s sister was a whore—the only reason could be a desire to besmirch his legacy. Harun has concluded that the prostitute is simply an invention of Meursault’s troubled psyche.

Sometimes, Harun thinks that Algeria as a whole can be understood “in the form of two imaginary women”—Meursault’s girlfriend in his own novel, with her “impossible innocence,” and the hypothetical sister of Musa, “a distant symbol of our land, plowed by customers and passerby.” Years ago, Harun was fully convinced that the prostitute represented an exploited Algeria; now, however, he remarks simply that he and Musa never had a sister.

On another note, Harun wonders what Meursault was doing on the beach. According to his novel, Musa was already there when Meursault arrived, so it’s almost as if he came there looking for Musa. Meursault didn’t have any right to idleness on the beach—he had a good job, was beginning to get famous as a writer, and could have gotten married to his girlfriend. His idleness and dissatisfaction with his life are as difficult to understand as his causeless murder.

Harun wants another drink, so he calls out to the bartender. As he gets older, it seems that more and more of the story’s elements don’t actually exist, from the beach itself to Musa’s imaginary sister, to the various witnesses who never appeared after the crime.

Harun knows that Meursault’s book is very successful, but he thinks it’s a “swindle.” He’s read a lot of Meursault’s work, and whenever he does, he feels like he’s looking in at a party “that neither my mother nor I had been invited to.” The entire story occurs without referencing them or their loss; the whole world participates in a story that eliminates any trace of their lives.

Harun breaks off and notices that the “bottle ghost” is absent tonight. He imagines that the ghost is at home “reading books nobody understands.”