The Stranger
A novel dramatising the absurd through a narrator condemned as much for his refusal to perform expected feeling as for the killing he commits.
Who should read it
Anyone approaching Camus for the first time, or reading The Myth of Sisyphus and wanting the same argument as a story rather than an essay.
Skip it if
You want Camus's argument rather than its dramatization. The Myth of Sisyphus states the position directly and was published the same year.
The Stranger (L'Étranger, 1942) is a short novel by Albert Camus and the narrative companion to his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, published the same year.
The book
The narrator, Meursault, is a clerk in French Algiers. The novel opens with his mother's death and his flat, unperformed reaction to it. In the second half he is tried for killing a man on a beach, and the trial turns steadily away from the killing toward his character — his dry eyes at the funeral, his ordinary pleasures in the days after. He is condemned as much for failing to display the expected feelings as for the act itself.
Camus wrote it in a deliberately flat style, in short declarative sentences and a tense that reports events without connecting them. The prose enacts the book's subject: a world that supplies no arrangement of events into meaning.
The absurd
The novel illustrates the absurd — the gap between a person's demand for meaning and a universe that offers none in reply. Meursault refuses to pretend to feelings he does not have or to accept explanations he does not believe, including the consolations offered before his execution. That refusal is what the society around him finds intolerable.
Camus rejected the existentialist label and his position differs from Sartre's: where Sartre emphasizes radical freedom and self-creation, Camus emphasizes lucidity about a situation that cannot be resolved, and living without appeal.
Reception
The novel made Camus internationally known and contributed to his Nobel Prize in 1957. Later criticism, particularly Edward Said's, has examined the treatment of the Arab victim, who is unnamed throughout — a silence the novel's structure depends on and never addresses. Kamel Daoud's The Meursault Investigation (2013) retells the story from the victim's family's perspective.
Questions
What is The Stranger about?
A clerk in French Algiers whose emotional flatness after his mother's death becomes central to his later trial for killing a man. He is condemned largely for failing to display expected feelings.
What does The Stranger say about the absurd?
It dramatizes the gap between the human demand for meaning and a universe that offers none. Meursault's refusal to feign feelings or accept consolation is presented as lucidity rather than defect.
Was Camus an existentialist?
He rejected the label. His emphasis falls on clear-sighted acceptance of an unresolvable situation, rather than on the radical freedom and self-creation central to Sartre's version of existentialism.