Camus and the Growing Stone - What Is Authenticity?

As Camus’s short story “The Growing Stone”, the last of six in Exile and the Kingdom, reaches its conclusion, its protagonist D’Arrast, having concluded the task of carrying a fifty-kilogram stone across Iguape and into the cook’s hut, experiences a sense of self-fulfillment and discovery, “obscure and panting joy” that transforms him into someone “enormous”. This is the first time that he has felt such an emotion, as he is “powerless to name it”, to connect it with a past feeling or memory. Shortly afterwards, the hut’s inhabitants arrive, only to be greeted with an image of D’Arrast in what can only be a feeling of tense repose, with a physical weariness formed as the product of an enormous exertion existing alongside the spiritual power of a newly-found authentic selfhood. On one hand, D’Arrast refuses to accept this intrusion, choosing not to answer when the cook’s family “looked…in silence as if questioning him.” However, the family is clearly pulled towards D’Arrast; rather than accepting this implicit “leave me be”, they choose to sit down around the stone. A cultural and class barrier has been broken as the result of D’Arrast’s heroic actions and an implicit understanding has been reached, governed by “no sound but the murmur of the river”, a communal silence that proves to be broad in its sweep. D’Arrast remains oblivious to his surroundings, inhabiting a solidarity enforced by the darkness that surrounds him. It is clear that his “joyful” acclamation of “his own strength” is shared by no one else but himself, his mind “tumultuous” in an attempt to make sense of his experiences and memories from earlier in the day. He is secure in the hope of “a fresh beginning in life”, symbolized by the firecracker that goes off almost immediately after his acclamation. He perceives the others merely through a single description: “cook”, “brother”, “old”, “girl of the night before”, having

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