I know that the Stranger is supposed to have Existentialist themes, and I don't really know enough about Existentialism to comment on that, but it seemed to me that the book was trying to show that all of the people who truly hated the protagonist actually hated life.
At the end for example, he says that he feels a true kinship with the indifference of life. It seems to equate his indifference through the whole book with how life is indifferent to suffering or pleasure, good and evil, people and their desires etc. And people ultimately come to hate him for this indifference.
One person actually calls him the "antichrist" at one point, he is sentenced to death, and the priest at the end becomes angry with him for not "confessing" to loving life and finding it beautiful. But it could be argued that the priest hates life far more than the protagonist does, because he refuses to accept the negative and unfeeling parts of it, the cold neutrality of life. He has convinced himself that it is a place of goodness created by a benevolent God, and it upsets him greatly when others don't reaffirm this belief.
Anyway, I found this idea interesting, that the protagonist was basically a personification of the "values" or lack thereof of life itself, and how the people were horrified when encountering a person who behaved in accordance with that. I'm curious if I'm way off or if that's how others see it too
by hyrule5
2 Comments
I don’t have an answer to your question, but I understood the Stranger far better after reading The Rebel and Sisyphus. Sentences from your post are the themes/arguments of those books.
How to live in a world indifferent to life/suffering is the core of The Rebel. Living with that knowledge is, itself, the ultimate act of rebellion.
The priest getting angry at him for not playing along with the whole “life is beautiful” thing was such a powerful moment – like you said, who really hates life more, the guy who accepts its indifference or the one who needs everyone else to validate his fairy tale about it