Would Meursault Have Felt Better on 20mg?

Albert Camus’s The Stranger is a classic of existentialist literature—a deceptively slim novel that opens with the unforgettable line: “Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.” From the start, the narrative resists comfort or clarity, much like its main character. In The Stranger, Meursault isn’t just a protagonist—he’s Camus’s embodiment of the absurd made flesh—his way of revealing what it truly means to carry the absurd in your veins.

From the very first lines, we understand the kind of man Meursault is: unbothered, indifferent, emotionally inert. He moves through life with a strange vacancy—psychologically detached from a world that expects him to care. Events that would rattle most of us—a parent’s death, a marriage proposal, even committing murder—leave him untouched. Nothing truly affects him. He doesn’t grieve his mother's passing. He feels nothing when a woman tells him she loves him. The world could be burning around him, and he’d still have his back to the flames, a cigarette smouldering between his lips.

At some level, many of us philosophical nerds secretly envy that detachment—until we look closer. For Meursault is also brutally honest, refusing to fake grief or perform emotions he does not feel. Through this stark indifference, Camus pointedly challenges moral expectations: the societal scripts that tell us how we should behave, how we should feel, how we should grieve. 

The Stranger becomes a critique of the performativity of grief—and of morality itself. Meursault’s refusal to cry at his mother’s funeral isn’t just callousness; it’s an act of philosophical rebellion. His heartlessness forces us to confront a broader question: do our emotions have meaning, or are they just responses we’ve been trained to mimic?

Meursault’s emotional detachment isn’t simply a narrative device—it’s the crux of his alienation. In a world that demands meaning, he shrugs. Where society sees grief as proof of morality, he sees only performance. And so, his refusal doesn’t just make people uncomfortable—it renders him unknowable. He doesn’t feel the need to be understood—nor can he be—for he can’t quite make sense of himself either. He simply accepts what is: himself, the world, the absurdity of it all. After all, in his eyes, fate is fixed and we’re all condemned to the same end. Why pretend otherwise?

At the baseline, Meursault is deemed an outsider not because he is immoral, but because he does not grieve. He isn’t moral or immoral—he is amoral. He simply doesn’t register the distinction between good and bad as meaningful. His actions are not guided by intention or consequence, but by indifference; he acts if he has the time or ability, and if not, he doesn’t. It isn’t that he lacks care or the capacity to feel—it’s that he sees no point. To him, whether an action is taken or left undone makes no difference to the world.

By the novel’s end, Meursault recognises that the universe mirrors his own stance—utterly indifferent to human life. He concludes that our comings and goings carry no grand meaning, that our actions ripple nowhere. This is the culmination of every moment we’ve witnessed. When he finally accepts “the gentle indifference of the world,” he finds a strange peace, and his arc is complete. Meanwhile, the reader is left holding the existential cherry atop the cake—Camus’s crisis now ours to wrestle with. Meursault has made his peace; the rest is our problem.

But here’s where things get interesting—at least, from a contemporary lens. If Meursault has made his peace with the absurd, we’re still left grappling with his rather keen detachment. And in today’s world, that kind of emotional flatness doesn’t just raise philosophical questions—it raises clinical ones.

In a modern context, Meursault might not be seen as an existential antihero, but as someone in need of treatment. Which begs the question: what if Meursault had tried Prozac?

I prescribed Prozac because the guy was, quite frankly, depressed beyond comprehension.

That said, it’s tempting to imagine that a pill designed to nudge the brain’s chemistry might’ve dulled his sharpened edges, patched up the emotional void, or handed him some neatly packaged version of peace. Could a pharmaceutical intervention have rewritten the narrative of The Stranger? Would the intensity of absurdity lighten under the influence of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors?

On one level, this feels almost absurd in itself. Meursault’s indifference isn’t a clinical symptom to be “cured,” but an esoteric stance to be understood. His emotional flatness is a purposeful confrontation with a meaningless universe, not a malfunction. To medicate him risks reducing a necessary existential inquiry intended by Camus into a mere chemical imbalance.

Yet, on another level, it forces us to confront uncomfortable questions about how we define mental health, emotional authenticity, and meaning. In our era, where diagnosis and treatment often mask existential discomfort, does medicating Meursault reveal a deeper cultural resistance to accepting the absurd? Is the demand for emotional normalcy itself a form of existential denial?

Does everything have to be folded into the umbrella of mental illness, or can a person’s outlook on life, the universe, and being simply be that—a perspective?

By asking whether Prozac could have changed Meursault, we don’t just ponder a hypothetical treatment—we interrogate how modern society processes alienation and despair. Perhaps Meursault’s crisis is still ours, but now filtered through the lens of neuroscience, pharmaceuticals, and the relentless quest for happiness.

In this light, the question isn’t simply “Would Meursault feel better on Prozac?” but rather: What does it mean to feel better when the universe itself refuses to care?

Still, let’s indulge the counterfactual. Suppose a well-meaning clinician, armed with the DSM-5 and a starter pack of SSRIs, had crossed paths with Camus’s drifter. A prescription is written, and the dose is titrated upward to 20 mg every morning.

Would we still have The Stranger—or would the novel collapse into a case study? Would courtroom spectators see a callous monster, or a man “responding well to treatment”?Would the famous opening—“Maman died today…”—be followed by a dutiful note of sorrow, arefully coaxed into being by serotonin?

In clinical terms, we might expect blunted nihilism, fewer existential migraines, perhaps even a newfound capacity for small talk. But artistically—and philosophically—the fallout is harder to stomach. Meursault’s indifference is not mere affective deficit; it is the engine of Camus’s challenge. Medicate him, and the novel’s cruel clarity risks dissolving into the polite static of “symptom management.” The very scandal of his honesty—his refusal to counterfeit grief—would be flattened into compliance.

Sure, in a less political sense, if Meursault had been put on Prozac, the result would be—paradoxically—something between tragedy and farce. Tragicomic, if you will: the absurd hero rendered “well-adjusted,” the universe still indifferent, but the protagonist now politely indifferent back. And perhaps that is the moodier punch line. The drug might dull the sting of the absurd, yet leave its logic intact, turning revolt into sedation and rebellion into routine follow-up visits—20 mg at breakfast, repeat ad infinitum.

Let’s say the dose finally takes hold. One morning, he might mutter, “I suppose I feel… something. Not happiness, exactly, but the coffee tastes less bitter, and when Marie smiled, I almost smiled back. That’s new."

He might start noticing the warmth in Marie’s voice instead of just her breasts. He might even hold her hand and not feel annoyed by the gesture. When asked if he wants to marry her, maybe he’d say, “Yes, I think I’d like that,” instead of his iconic “It didn’t matter to me.”

His detachment? Duller. His internal monologue? A little more human. A little less void.

He might still find life absurd—but not unbearably so. Maybe he'd attend therapy, write a mediocre poem about sunlight, and think, “Life is still meaningless, but I’m okay with that now.”

Does that even sound like Camus’s Meursault? Hardly—more like his sedated, faintly contented alter ego. Absurd, in its own way, and certainly not what Camus intended. Yet the hypothetical lingers, prodding at the sutures between society’s ideals, medication, mental health, and the stubborn variety of human perspectives.

Prozac would certainly dull the honed edge of his indifference—sand it down into something resembling calm. Maybe the existential shrug would soften, slackening into a gentler kind of surrender. He might start engaging more—go to the beach without passively watching the sun boil his skull. Maybe he’d stop sleeping twelve hours a day or blinking blankly at the absurdity of it all. Perhaps he'd spend less time zoning out to contemplate the ridiculous futility of caring—when, in truth, we all know he doesn’t care at all. He simply wonders why that is.

Would he still stare at his mother’s coffin and think, “It doesn’t matter,” or would he begin to wonder if it actually did?

Would he still shoot a man on the beach because the sun was in his eyes, or would Prozac dial down the heat enough to let him walk away?

Maybe he’d look at the sky one evening and think, “This is nice.” But then he'd immediately wonder if that fleeting pleasure was just serotonin in disguise—and whether anything is ever truly chosen, or just chemically nudged and redesigned to suit his needs. 

The absurdity that Camus captured in Meursault hinges on his refusal—or inability—to conform to emotional expectation. If Prozac gave him even a mild sense of attachment, of social rhythm, of meaning—wouldn’t that undermine the entire existential point?

Camus didn’t give us Meursault to be cured. He gave us a man who lives and dies without illusions. Who stares into the blank face of the universe and doesn’t flinch. Prozac, for all its real-world uses, is the antithesis of that. It suggests emotional alignment is possible, even desirable. Camus would call that a comforting blooming lie.

So yes—Meursault on Prozac might cry, might connect, might regret. But that’s not Meursault anymore. That’s just a French guy having a decent day.

And The Stranger? That would just become a vaguely sad novel about a man trying to feel okay. The absurd would give way to serotonin.

And that, ironically, would be the most absurd thing of all.

So, in the end, I don’t think Meursault would stay on Prozac. Not because it doesn’t work, but because it might. And for someone who clings to the purity of absurdity, feeling better might be the most meaningless act of all.

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Glossary:

Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) - a class of antidepressants that work by increasing serotonin levels in the brain.

Amoral - lacking a moral sense; unconcerned with the rightness or wrongness of something.

Esoteric - intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest.

Existentialism - the philosophical belief that we are each responsible for creating purpose or meaning in our own lives. Our individual purpose and meaning is not given to us by Gods, governments, teachers or other authorities. | It explores the individual's struggle to lead an authentic life in a world that is apparently absurd or incomprehensible.

Counterfactual - relating to or expressing what has not happened or is not the case.

Nihilism - a philosophy that rejects the notion of inherent meaning, purpose, or value in life. It encompasses various views, including the idea that life is meaningless, that moral values are arbitrary, and that knowledge is unattainable.

Farce - a comic dramatic work using buffoonery and horseplay and typically including crude characterization and ludicrously improbable situations.

Tragicomic - describes something that is both funny and sad, or that combines elements of tragedy and comedy.

Ad infinitum - a Latin phrase meaning "to infinity" or "without end." It describes something that repeats or continues endlessly, without any limit or stopping point.

Antithesis - a person or thing that is the direct opposite of someone or something else.

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BONUS!

As someone who’s read The Stranger nearly seven times now, here are a few lines, phrases, and fragments of thought from our beloved Meursault—ones that altered my brain chemistry as potently as any 20mg dose ever could:

• “I said people never change their lives, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn’t dissatisfied with mine here at all.”

• “It was then that I realised that you could either shoot or not shoot.”

• “To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing.”

• “When I was first imprisoned, the hardest thing was that my thoughts were still those of a free man.”

• “I hadn’t understood how days could be both long and short at the same time: long to live through, maybe, but so drawn out that they ended up flowing into one another. They lost their names. Only the words “yesterday” and “tomorrow” still had any meaning for me.”

• “I had never been able to truly feel remorse for anything. My mind was always on what was coming next, today or tomorrow.”

• “All I care about right now is escaping the machinery of justice, seeing if there’s any way out of the inevitable.”

• “But still I would try to picture the exact moment when the beating of my heart would no longer be going on inside my head.”

• “We were all condemned to die.” | “But if you don’t die today, you’ll die tomorrow, or the next day. And then the same question will arise. How will you face that terrifying ordeal?”

• “I will die, and once I die, nothing will remain.”

• “According to him, human justice was nothing and divine justice was everything.”

• “What did other people’s deaths or a mother’s love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elecr matter to me when we’re all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also call themselves my brothers? Couldn’t he see, couldn’t he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. And he would be condemned, too.”

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