The Meursault Investigation: Chapter 8 Summary & Analysis

Harun shoots the Frenchman with seven bullets, two more than Meursault fired into Musa. Mama stands behind him the whole time, and Harun feels that she is guiding him and helping him take aim. The man looks surprised as Harun shoots him, and a dog barks. It occurs to Harun that the man’s death is “not a murder but a restitution.”

Behind Harun, Mama breathes softly, much more easily than she has since Musa died. It’s nighttime, and the moon seems to calm everything down. Harun knows that, with this deed accomplished, Mama is “packing her bags, on her way to meet old age.” Harun imagines that Musa is talking to him. When you murder someone, he tells the interlocutor, your mind immediately starts to make up explanations in order to absolve your guilt.

Harun already knows he won’t be punished for the murder. Outside, the War of Liberation is raging, so this murder will be considered part of the combat. It’s one of the first days of Independence and all is chaos, with the French trying to flee or save their possessions while young men, filled with revolutionary fervor, maraud in the streets.

After killing the Frenchman, Harun feels a sense of immense freedom. Finally, he’s no longer being silently asked to murder someone but has already done it. He can finally go to the movies, or on a date with a woman. He and Mama look at the body for a long time, with Mama still holding Harun’s arm. Harun has always considered himself a prisoner to “Musa’s death and my mother’s vigilance,” but now he sees himself inhabiting the entire night, free to do what he wishes.

Mama is already looking at the body and planning the grave they must now dig. She exhorts Harun to work quickly, and sweeps away the sand. As he works to obscure the details of this murder, he thinks of how Meursault obscured the details of his own crime. It occurs to Harun that he has murdered the Frenchman around two in the morning, just as Meursault murdered Musa at two in the afternoon.

Harun and Mama bury the Frenchman’s body quickly. No one seems to have noticed the gunshots. In any case, right now no one in the village is concerned about vanished French people. Back in the present, Harun tells the interlocutor that he now knows Harun’s secrets. The “bottle ghost” might have heard as well, but Harun doesn’t really care.

Harun didn’t even know the Frenchman he killed. He resumes his story. Moments before the murder, the Frenchman climbs the wall outside the house in order to take refuge in the garden, awakening Harun and Mama in the process. There is a lot of killing going on outside, between the liberation army and the unofficial freedom fighters. People are abandoning the fields and settlers are fleeing in large numbers.

The Larquais family left three months ago, so since then Mama has commandeered their house, and Harun stays up every night on watch for burglars. On their departure, the family had charged Mama with looking after the house until their return, but she knows they will never come back. At first, Mama and Harun are too intimidated to settle into the main house, but they take over the kitchen and eventually sleep in the bedrooms. In order to cement their ownership of the house, Mama invites some neighbor women over for coffee and gives Harun a jacket left behind in a closet.

In the days following, it seems impossible to trust anyone. Any neighbor could kick them out of the house by brute force. Once, Harun sees a resistance fighter shooting out streetlights so he can plunder in the dark.

Some of the French have stayed, as they are technically entitled to official protection. One afternoon, Harun walks past a group of them protesting the recent murder of two French people by resistance fighters. He notices the Frenchman whom he will shoot two days later, wearing the same shirt. When they make eye contact, the other man looks away. Harun recognizes him as a friend of Mama’s employers, who often comes to visit. Harun walks home quickly—people are suspicious of his refusal to join the resistance, so he doesn’t go out much.

When Harun hears noises on the night in question, Mama is already awake and directs him to pick up the gun, which he found in the shed weeks before. When he goes outside, he finds that the sounds are coming from a panting man near the shed. Harun knows he could just walk away, but Mama is standing behind him demanding revenge.

Harun is sure that he and Mama thought about Musa simultaneously, believing that killing this Frenchman is their duty to Musa and at the same time a chance to move past him. As Harun moves forward, the Frenchman moves away, and “the darkness devoured what remained of his humanity.”

After shooting the Frenchman, Harun drags his corpse into the courtyard, where he and Mama bury it with difficulty. The night begins to lighten and the trees of the courtyard become visible. Harun realizes that something very important has ended; he lies down in the courtyard and closes his eyes. When he opens them, he sees stars and knows that he is “trapped in a bigger dream, a more gigantic denial” than he was before.