The Stranger

I read Gide’s The Immoralist and The Stranger in succession while traveling, both in cheap dog-eared mass-market paperback editions (a particular tactile, olfactory experience in itself), and the pairing made me think of literary themes unfolding between the fin de siècle and WWII, Gide’s protagonist Michel guided by Eros (What is available to you in this modern world?), Camus’ Meursault trapped by Fate (This world has Nothing for you, monsieur). Camus’ unadorned prose is an effective antidote to wasted sentiment.

The only thing that interests me now is the problem of circumventing the machine, learning if the inevitable admits a loophole.

I admit part of this is me kneejerking against its reputation, although I genuinely didn't find much that made it worthwhile - it IS kind of interesting, although it's hard to understand the emphasis on "oh he doesn't react properly!" as opposed to him being a murderer and immediately joining in with a stranger's plot to violently assault a woman he's been pimping out. The narrator gives an affect of not caring but the enthusiasm with which he joins in with Raymond's violence is shocking - he refuses to help a long term neighbour find his dog, he refuses to care about his girlfriend's feelings, but a violent, racist pimp? Mersault is WAY up for that.

I suppose the like, deeper moral contrast is with Mersault killing a random Arab man show more supposedly because "it was hot" and the state killing him because he didn't properly fulfil his role as a French citizen. As someone pretty wholly opposed to the death penalty, there is something there. But it's hard to take the philosophising of Mersault seriously in the context that he did very much kill someone in cold blood, and if he had got away with it it would be because French settler society is horrifically racist.

I think there's a few interesting things to stew on but primarily Mersault is just like so many other racist, violent, misogynist men. I can imagine some of it was innovative at the time but similar ideas since make it seem shallow. There's something to be said for a portrait of an unpleasant man in a racist society but Camus doesn't really want to go into it. Frustrating book whose reputation surprises me. show less

I did not like Camus’ The Stranger. But I immediately felt why it was a classic and important.

I read the book for the first time in one sitting while flying back from Chicago to Oakland. My good friend (Todd) just got married. Although written in 1946. Camus seems to capture the nihilism embraced so commonly in our generation today. There is a deep and profound felt meaninglessness in our lives and daily interactions. Regardless of what I do, we feel it does little to change the world.

Camus said that in The Stranger he explored “the nakedness of man faced with the absurd.”

He closes the book by saying, “As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I show more opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.” Everyone dies. This is certain. Some believe with “certainty” of what happens after that death, but who knows. Such ignorance feels absurd. The likeliness that no one in 200 years will even know my name leaves me feeling uneasy. The Stranger wrestles with that feeling in narrative form. It is an important half-truth to life, one which we shrink from and deny.

Profoundly thought provoking. Needed engagement particularly from religious people who have everything figured out. Highly recommended. show less

A novel that to me revolves around interpreting the couple of pages describing a murder, moreso than the lack of affect preceding it or following in the second trial half. Having just read The Postman Always Rings Twice made an interesting point of comparison as that book, while filled with much more passion and intensity, also revolves around an apathetic attitude to murder. While Cain ostensibly gives us more base motivations of greed and sex, it's still a book with no deeper answer to why than wanting to, especially as both motivations are stripped away with time. Which is to say, with minimal rewriting, The Stranger could well be a noir novel. What in one tone would be the futility of venal human desires and apathy to life, has been show more turned over and over as a story presenting the absurdity of existence. The distance between the two either moralizing or the expectation of the world making sense. The random capricious nature of humanity is either the gaping wound of society or a fact of life.
Must we imagine Sisyphus happy, or is he groaning in agony the entire time? show less

The Stranger is about Meursault, an unemotional, rational man who shoots and Arab on the beach. After the shooting, he stands trial and is sentenced to be executed by the guillotine. He spends the latter part of the novel dealing with his impending death, which is the heart of the novel. How do we deal with death, and how do we become free from our fear of death and living?

I loved The Stranger, but I shouldn’t have loved the stranger. As a Christian, I should have been appalled at Camus’s insistence, through the story of the condemned criminal Meursault, that life is meaningless and the world is absurd. Yet, I did love it. Regardless of religious beliefs, it is impossible to escape and fail to appreciate the rationality of Camus’s show more point. Regardless of when we die, we are all going to die eventually, and the world will go on without us. Our existence has no great purpose, and there is nothing to fear in death. Freedom comes from accepting these premises. While I may not agree with the underlying warrants in this viewpoint, it is difficult to disagree with these conclusions if you accept these warrants. For this reason, I loved the novel. Camus’s entire philosophy of the absurd was portrayed beautifully in an engaging story that was difficult to refute if one first accepts Camus’s underlying beliefs. show less

I was asked recently what this book is about. And I realized that's difficult to answer. What happens and what it's about aren't necessarily the same thing -- and in fact, I would probably argue that they are two distinct things in this case.

What happens is fairly simple. A man attends his mother's funeral, then kills an Arab, and is sentenced to death for it. In fact, what happens is so unvital to what the story is about, in my view, that I have no qualms with spoiling it outright. What the story is ABOUT, however, is more of... coming to grips with the indifference of the universe.

And that's what it comes down to, for me. Meursault is able to accept the absurdity of existence. Hopefully the reader will be able to as well. It's either show more that or run from it forever. show less

This is the story of a man who is living the life of the “absurd” as described by Camus in the Myth of Sisyphus. However, it is only his senseless and unintended murder of an Arab and his subsequent imprisonment and trial which bring him to a full appreciation of his life and how he has led it.

In the first part of the book, Meursault is shown as both separated from and indifferent to life. He does not cry at his mother’s funeral, he agrees to become the “copain” of his disreputable neighbor, Raymond Sintes, because he can think of no reason not to, and he assents to Marie’s desire to marry while recognizing that he does not actually love her. This indifference does not prevent him from living the ordinary day-to-day life show more and going through all the proper motions, including performing well in his job.

But then he shoots the Arab on the beach, and the best explanation he can make is that thirst and the heat of the sun caused him to do it. While in prison and in the course of his trial he begins to reflect more on his life. Rather than reject the life he has led, he becomes more aware of himself and embraces his life. Because he remains true to himself, he is ultimately condemned to death. He does not want to die but in his last days in prison he is at peace with himself and regrets nothing (other than that he had not learned more about executions).

Meursault is thus an example of the absurd man described in The Myth of Sisyphus. Almost instinctively, he recognizes that life is meaningless and that religion, love and ambition cannot change that reality. His patron offers him a promotion to work in Paris, but Meursault turns him down. He enjoys and needs his physical relationship with Marie but has no illusions about love or marriage bringing meaning to life. The chaplain in the prison (as well as the investigating judge and his lawyer) tries to bring him to God, but Meursault is unbudgeable in his atheism, nor will he express remorse for his mother’s death or regret for the death of the Arab.

The funeral of his mother is the first event of the book. But he comes back to his memories of her throughout the book until his final moments in prison. While he says that she cried to be put in the elder home (which is a long bus ride from Algiers), in most respects she seems to be the model for her son’s attitudes. He says that she too did not believe in God. She always said that one adapts to everything. (At first, prison was a punishment for him because of his cravings for women, the sea and cigarettes, but ceased to be so when he ceased to have the cravings.) Just like his mother took a fiancé at the end of her life, he also wants to continue to live.

He feels like an intruder at his own trial. He feels he is being tried for being indifferent to his mother. The prosecutor links the murder of the Arab to the burial of his mother. Meursault recognizes that death is inevitable, but it galls him to lose twenty years of life. At the end he does not feel despair but he has fear of death. Opening himself to the “tender indifference” of the world, he realizes he had been and still is happy. His last thought is that he hopes he will have a “grand” execution with many spectators who welcome him with cries of hate. show less