The First Man

Albert Camus died in a car crash in 1960. The unfinished manuscript of an epic novel was found in the wreckage of the sports car. The book was "only the beginning of a novel that would have been longer by several hundred pages, about Algeria from the arrival of the French to the Second World War, including the war itself, and the Resistance to the German Occupation as lived by the protagonists in a love affair".

The unfinished manuscript was called The First Man. It includes autobiographical details like a main character that plays soccer at a boy's school in Algiers, who then goes home every day to a suffering mother and overbearing grandmother. Camus' father died in the Battle of the Marne in 1914, just like the father of the main character Henri Cormery,

The death of Henri's father forced him to grow up, "in the land of oblivion where each one is the first man, where he had to bring himself up, without a father, having never known those moments when a father would call his son, after waiting for him to reach the age of listening, to tell him the family's secret, or a sorrow of long ago [...] and he was sixteen, then he was twenty, and no one had spoken to him, and he had to learn by himself, to grow alone, in fortitude, in strength, find his own morality and truth, at last to be born as a man".

Camus leads the reader to understand that we are all Adam or Eve. Each one of us are forced to figure out how to live in a confusing world we have never been to before. We are all versions of The First Man. It is something to think about throughout our lives as we create a personal system of morality and an understanding of reality that can sustain us within societies that are at times wonderfully healthy or brutally painful.

Albert Camus refers several times to biblical stories throughout his narration. He mentions the Garden of Eden, the Promised Land, the malevolent Cain, and even equated his suffering and saintly mother to Christ.

The main character in the book was reminded of mythical stories he heard about France during the winter. He had never been to France, but he dreamed about the exotic stories and descriptions of Paris. While sitting in class at the boy's school in Algiers, he was transported to France on rainy days where, "the smell of wet wool that emanated from the wool coats at the back of the classroom and seemed to be a harbinger of that Garden of Eden where children in wooden shoes and woolen hoods ran through the snow to their warm homes".

As a man, the main character Henri searched out people who had known his father before the war. He listened to an old doctor describe how his town in Algeria was founded in 1848, "There was a lot of unemployment in Paris, there was unrest, and the Constituent Assembly had voted fifty million francs to send a colony of settlers. They promised everyone a house and 2 to 10 hectares. 'You can imagine how they applied. More than a thousand. And all of them dreaming of the Promised Land. Especially the men. The women, they were afraid of the unknown. Not the men! They hadn't made the revolution for nothing'".

The old doctor told of lasting conflicts between local Arab residents and settlers from France since 1848. In speaking of the way French settlers treated local residents in Algeria, the French doctor explained, "Let's be fair. We shut them up in caves with their whole brood, yes indeed, yes indeed, and they cut the balls off the first Berbers, who themselves ... and so on all the way back to the first criminal - you know, his name was Cain - and since then it's been war; men are abominable, especially under a ferocious sun".

Camus uses the title of his book The First Man to suggest we are all a sort of Adam or Eve. The first two humans were merely archetypes for everyone after them, who must make our way in the world with no real guidance from elders, especially if we have grown up without a parent. The allusion to the Garden of Eden brings to mind an ideal place that exists somewhere else, while the Promised Land implies a place where a new life can be built after leaving our current suffering behind. The reference to Cain suggests that, even though we know we should love our neighbor, we carry inside of us the ability and even desire to kill our brother.

The First Man is a thought-provoking novel that, even though it is incomplete, tells a moving story of a man searching for his past and discovers he misses his father more than he ever realized.

Notes:

1. xiii

2. 195

3. 145

4. 185

5. 191

French Children at Christmas

1920 - The Casbah of Algiers

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