The Meursault Investigation: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

Meeting his interlocutor again at his own apartment, Harun turns down the offer of a coffee. He says he hates Fridays, which he normally spends on the balcony of his apartment, looking at the nearby mosque. Watching young children play, he feels like he’s seeing them push the older generations off a cliff. He hates them, although he’s ashamed of this feeling.

One of Harun’s neighbors reads the Koran loudly all night on the weekends. No one can tell him to stop, because he’s doing it in the name of God. For Harun, religion is “public transportation I never use.” He wants to travel towards God, but not as part of an “organized trip.” He doesn’t know if he believes in God, but he does know that while other people “natter” about his spiritual condition, he is the only one who understands his life and pays his bills, and he will die alone. He certainly doesn’t want to “run panting after a father who has never set foot on earth.”

Responding to an unheard question, Harun says he doesn’t know anything more about his father than what he’s already said. There are no surviving photographs, Mama would never talk about him, and Harun has no tribe to preserve his memory. Now, he feels that he’s taken after his father in that he turned his back on a future family by refusing to get married. Although he’s “known the love of lots of women,” he can’t get rid of “a mighty distrust” of women as a whole.

No woman has been able to liberate Harun from his own mother and her constant unspoken accusations that he hasn’t avenged Musa’s death. Moreover, when Harun was young he lived in Hadjout, a conservative society where boys could only speak to women who were relatives.

The only exception to Harun’s distrust of women is Meriem, with whom he had a brief relationship in 1963. He still remembers her “wild hair.” Meriem was the only woman “willing to defy my mother” by not treating Harun as though he was his mother’s property. They saw each other briefly during the summer, had a long correspondence, and then drifted apart. He doesn’t know if she’s married or where she is now.

Harun says that Friday is “the day closest to death.” People wear pajamas in the streets, as though “religious faith encourages laziness in private matters.” In fact, Harun thinks people have started to dress sloppily in general. Men of his habits seem to be disappearing.

Harun especially dislikes the prayer hour, when he hears the imam’s voice through the loudspeakers and sees people walking down the street with their prayer rugs. For him, it underlines the essential “hypocrisy” of the “devout.” Harun says that Friday is the day God “decided to run away and never come back.” The absence of God is clear in the absent look on people’s faces.

In fact, Harun hates all religions, because they “falsify the weight of the world.” Sometimes he wants to break through the wall and throttle his neighbor and tell him to stop praying, “accept the world,” and accept “his own dignity.” Harun points out the window at a girl who is wearing a veil, even though she’s too young to “know what a body is.”

On Friday all the bars are closed. People think that Harun is strange because he doesn’t pray and cultivates his solitude. It seems odd that he’s gotten so old without becoming religious. However, Harun feels that he’s already approached death; now he’s returned and is watching other people “marching to death in single file.”

Harun keeps his beliefs to himself, because he knows his neighbors are already suspicious of him, especially because he drinks so much. Even though they sometimes insult him in the street, he feels pity for his neighbors, who believe that God has spoken to just one man and then disappeared forever. When he looks through “their book” (the Koran), it seems full of “redundancies, repetitions, lamentations, threats, and daydreams.”

Harun wonders what the “bottle ghost” does on Fridays. Maybe he goes to the beach, or returns home to a wife and mother. Every Friday the sky looks different to Harun, and he remembers the awful days during his time in Hadjout, when he felt that he was stuck there forever.

Harun has sat on his balcony observing the world below for so many years that all the people seem like “a single person” that he tries to avoid. His neighbors are familiar—there’s a retired soldier who washes his car all the time, a fireman who beats his wife, and a small man who rents folding chairs for funerals and marriages.

This is only one of Harun’s balconies. The other one is inside his head, and from it he looks out onto the hot beach, Musa’s body, and Meursault holding a gun. The man is very thin, and he seems stiff like a robot. The scene always remains the same, but Harun can only look at it, not “step inside” and change the outcome. Imagining it now, he feels the same emotions as when he was seven—anger, sadness, and curiosity.

In this tableau, Meursault looks nothing like “the other one,” the Frenchman Harun killed. That man was very large and blonde. Harun knows his interlocutor is wondering who that man was and what happened. He says that “there’s always another” person even when one thinks one is alone, “staring at you or turning his back to you and deepening the perspectives of your solitude.”