The Stranger is my first exposure to Camus, and it's one I really enjoyed. Very quick read – I think I burned through it in about a day and a half. Despite its length though it definitely packed quite a punch for me. I haven't really looked at a lot of discussion on the book and just wanted to see people's thoughts on it.
To me, the whole thing kind of felt like an off-kilter fever dream. Meursault is such a closed-off and emotionally reserved (stunted maybe?) character that it really leads to the narrative feeling very detached and clinical. It always seems like it's just on the verge of some kind of emotional release, but then it pulls back. This was most evident to me during the beach sequence, when Meursault decides to just fucking light up the Arab. The whole sequence with the oppressive heat bearing down on him and inching him closer to some kind of mental breakdown that never quite comes. Same thing during the court hearings, seems like Meursault is almost about to feel something or judge himself or something, but it never quite manifests.
I'm trying to decide exactly what Camus is trying to portray. Is it a character study of an emotionally dead individual who forgot how to feel and just can't be bothered anymore? Or is there some cultural/societal commentary I'm missing? Perhaps he's this way because of the society he lives in? He seems to see the people and the world around him at a remove, not feeling any particular way about anything. He even tells Marie that saying I love you has no meaning.
Or is it the fact that the only way to deal with a crazy world is to completely close yourself off from it, so you don't have to experience the pain and suffering that it brings?
Would love to hear more thoughts and interpretations.
by Monkey-on-the-couch
31 Comments
Meesault’s detachment from society, those around him, and the consequences of his actions is kind of the point. He is showing standard traits of an existentialist and also Absurdist (which Camus was a proponent of).
Existentialism states that one is free and that only the individual is responsible for their own development through acts of will (i.e. when he just straight up smokes the Arab). Absurdism is a concept which dictates that one (or rather all of us) live in purposeless and chaotic universe (which I think is ironically rather absurd. Purpose is what you want it to be and each individual’s purpose is different from another person’s). You should read Camus’ essay titled *The Myth of Sisyphus* to gain further insight into Absurdism.
I read it years ago and I don’t remember what I thought about what you’re asking specifically. But I remember I absolutely loved the book and I thought it was just brilliant way to write about someone so boring really but somehow still very interesting
I’m no professor but I took it more as peoples horror at someone being detached/apathetic and how society judges those who do not engage.
Theres probably supposed to be an existential element in it because its Camus, but I didnt sense that myself
I always read this allegory for human condition in general.
Mersault is just a bit exaggerated every man.
Every human is an island into themselves, no matter how much we go along with motions of fitting in.
Even being in jail waiting for execution is just human condition.
After all are not we all stuck on a little ball of mud waiting for inevitable death?
I read this for a class in high school, and the day after we finished the book, the teacher played bohemian rhapsody for us. The lyrics hit us totally different, you should go listen to it right now
[bohemian Rhapsody](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ9rUzIMcZQ)
It’s an interesting companion piece to Being There by Kosinski, where the crowd of public opinion projects its own neuroses, fears, and desires upon a blank slate of a man.
For me, although the first half of the novel is a great story, it’s the second half that I think Camus was interested in. I think Camus is trying to explore how someone who’s completely outside normal human society should react to being persecuted or prosecuted by that society.
A good analogy for Meursault is Oscar Wilde. Camus’ friend Andre Gide knew Oscar Wilde fairly well and wrote lots of interesting things about him. His book ‘The Immoralist’ is probably partly inspired by Wilde, and Wilde’s stated desire to follow a path of evil or wickedness.
Anyway, long story short, Wilde was prosecuted and jailed for rebelling against social norms, and Gide wrote about meeting Wilde after he’d been released from prison. Wilde at that stage was a pathetic and broken man. He’d been an “outsider” who’d rebelled against society, and society had responded by destroying him. Camus seems to be asking if this fate is inevitable. Is this inevitable that an outsider will be broken after being prosecuted/persecuted by society?
In the final scene of The Stranger, Meursault is not a broken man. He’s come to terms with both his wrongdoing and the judgment of society and seems accepting of his forthcoming execution.
Anyway, that’s my interpretation.
It’s less of a character study and more of a philosophical book on existentialism and sort of the author’s belief about the absurdity or meaninglessness of human life and the universe.
Read Nausea by Sartre if you’re wanting to dive deeper into existentialist literature. There’s a section where the narrator kinda goes nuts over recognizing and ultimately coming to grips with his existence. Bit of a slog compared to Camus (Sartre isn’t a novelist by trade) but it’s worth reading a different spin on existentialist themes.
I gotta say, the novel has a powerful opening though: “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.” A novel that starts like that, you know it’s already getting people to have a particular feeling about the main character.
In “the Fall” he says “Human affairs are not serious matters “. Maybe that’s all there is to it.
Camus is a master of writing about people at the edge of society, and I love him for it.
I read it as a neurodivergent horror story. The whole time I felt like Meursault was thinking one very literal way, a way that reminded me of autistic friends, and everyone around him is living in a different world of tacit communication and layers of social meaning that the neurotypical reader is privy to but he isn’t. Different conclusions are drawn entirely.
Even on the beach, his focus is on the sensory overload of the heat and unbearable sunlight. Ours is on the dead man. In jail, in court, he is never saying what anyone wants to hear because he can’t. Instead he gives voice to his honest experience, which is just too strange for the community. For us. He is L’Étranger, and killed for his strangeness.
I just read it.
it’s a good commentary on the absurdity of society.
At the same time, fuck Mersault. He’s an asshole with very little empathy. How he helped Raymond about the woman abuse, how he murders someone without any regrets or remorse or care for that man’s family, and many more…
he’s a selfish asshole and not one that readers should empathize of feel bad for. Though some seems so anyways.
I read it in the original French to get closer to the author’s world and I could really feel the alienation, detachment, and the absurd idea that we can just understand the world around us. That we can be a part of something without knowing the finer details or even the bigger picture. I think it would have helped if I could understand French but I’m happy with my decision.
Maybe because of the heads space I was in at the time of reading I took from it that not caring about things will ultimately lead you to a bad place, because you will just go with the flow and if you don’t think about your life and put some moral structure into your decisions then your life will be worse than if you do think about it and create some values to live by.
Check out The Talented Mister Ripley next. I find them to be very similar books, but the latter is somewhat more accessible.
I’ve read “The Stranger” many times over my book reading history (decades, beginning in the 80s): and there have been times when I thought of Meursault, as “the man”, like – I’m just like him: and other reads have had me thinking, this man’s pathetic, he dead inside. Last read, a few years ago, I could relate to our anti-hero positively.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone use the words “Camus” and “enjoyed” in the same sentence. Like Joyce, I think it’s a fair assessment that Camus is one of those guys who wouldn’t sell a lot of books, but for English Lit courses; maybe a philosophy class or two for Camus.
I think it’s more absurdist than existentialist, although I don’t claim to know much about either, in that he does seem to realise when in prison that there is an illogical meaning to life in the little day to day things which we often disregard and go unnoticed, which I find quite beautiful. The following passage is striking in how different the prose is to elsewhere in the book:
“I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn’t mine anymore, but one in which I’d found the simplest and most lasting joys: the smells of summer, the part of town I loved, a certain evening sky, Marie’s dresses and the way she laughed.”
It’s been a while since I read the stranger but my interpretation was that meursault is an empty container & people don’t generally like that or know what to do with it. The “theme” of the novel is an existential question mark
This book changed my life. It’s not always possible to engage, and it’s all right to choose not to. Be aware that there may be consequences.
I’ve always seen it as the emotionality of man tied directly to our association with humanity.
Basically, the Stranger of Camus work is a being with almost no emotional care or affectation for what happens to him. He is a careless watcher, only partaking in what is front of him. In the case of the murder, he never feels remorse for the dead man or his family. Instead, Mersault just feels like it happens.
Camus is pointing the carelessness of the Universe at us, with a human effigy as the mirror. Mersault, to me, represented the uncaring nature of reality. From that perspective, the final trial read like humankind putting an uncaring universe on trial.
Mersault’s reaction is a jubilant exclusion. His separation from the (what he sees as) the irrationality of human emotion and society as proof to his own truth. In the end, he couldn’t care less what they decided to do with him.
I really loved the Stranger too, I still find myself thinking about what Camus was trying to say. He also wrote “The Plague” which I really enjoyed. I need to read more of his works
He’s an existential hero. He never takes the easy way out. He could have lied about not caring about Maman’s death. He doesn’t. We’re all going to die. He could have faked accepting Jesus and not received the death penalty. He doesn’t. He could have cracked up in his cell. Instead he learns to enjoy lovely memories. He lives and dies by his code. A true existential hero.
read The Stranger while procrastinating on laundry. By the end, I was questioning life and still had no clean socks. Meursault’s indifference made me feel better about my own chaotic existence—guess we’re all just winging it!
Albert Camus was an abstract thinker. And his character has some bits and pieces from his personality. Thinking in terms of hidden meanings behind situations is hard to be easily communicated. There seems to always be a gap between ‘you’ and ‘the world’, a sense of remoteness that cannot easily vanish. You learn to dissolve life scenes in your mind and look at things from several standpoints without necessarily getting attached to any option in the process. It is similar to the process of filtration – a lot of things need to pass through you but only the solid/most important ones remain on the filter paper. Also, the beginning of the novel could be differently interpreted if we understand that what, where and who are elements that matter only by the end of a process in which one tries to figure out ‘why’. Hope it helps knowing that abstract thinkers think in reverse.
I really love The Stranger and I love The Plague even more. The Camus collection of creative essays is also excellent.
To me, Meursault encapsulates the idea of “nothing really matters, so why care?” In the end we all die, no matter if we’ve been exceptional or profoundly mediocre. His mother dies, he doesn’t care enough to remember the date. He kills a man, he doesn’t care about the consequences. He is sentenced to death, *ah okay*.
What stuck out the most to me is the ending, when Meursault embraces the “tender indifference of the world”. Precisely because nothing really matters, we should make it matter.
Camus is an existentialist author. Stranger is a book about how pointless socials rules and how well one is able to follow them can form a persons life. The protagonist is someone who does not follow social rules and acts from raw intention. He commits murder, but he is judged for something else. He gets his sentence not for breaking the law, but for what kind of person he is. He is persecuted, for basically not being sad enough on hid mothers funeral. No one cares, that him and his mother were not close and her dying did not make a big impact on him. Like if a stranger has died. It is socially acceptable to mourn death, if one does not, they are judged. This is the existentialist point Camus makes, there are so much dishonesty in the world, and rules, that do not necessarily follow logic, but we are made to follow them anyways.
I read this book long time ago, so I do not remember many examples. What stuck to me the most was the mothers funeral.
i think the main idea of the book was that it is undeniable that the universe is indifferent towards our actions in life and particularly in meursault’s case, this realisation acts as both enlightenment and downfall for him, making his life all the more absurd
It is about nihilist philosophy. Which was just emerging at that time, he was one of the main players in the philosophy. It means to them that life is meaningless. It’s a dark and bleak outlook. I was obsessed w the philosophy and idealogy as a 15 year old, and loved the book when I read it. Look into camus’ teachings and the writings of Nietzsche.