The Stranger

This is not light reading. Despite its length of 123 pages, The Stranger is a literary endurance test: exhausting, exhaustive, excruciating ... and excellent.Meursault is nobody special. A pied-noir residing in pre-World War II Algeria, he guns down an Arab in cold blood on a blistering summer day. The protagonist is thrust into the limelight, and a man who once took life at face value finds himself examining a vacuous life.Such is the plot, but this author's main interests lies elsewhere. Is life not absurd, Camus challenges us through his anti-hero Mersault, when human life is so terminal and soon-forgotten? If yes, why not thrash it and mock it? This question of the absurd has drawn many comparisons with Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, but Camus shook off the existentalist moniker, and this is a tribute to the Frenchman's intellectual honesty. For the idea of the absurd in this novella contrasts sharply with those of classic existentalists, and Camus's artistic technique differs as well.My reading of The Stranger hinged on whether, like existentialists, Camus intended to create humor or artistic distance, and in the end, finding no such evidence in the text, I decided he did not. This is bone-hard reality: a prima facie argument delivered with raw power and skilled craftsmanship, but without, I think, sufficient perspective. Unlike Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, Camus is not poking fun at a 20th-century Chernyshevsky or Hegel here. Camus is right in there with Mersault--dead serious--in this tract of complex ideas and stark layering. The protagonist's declarative statements carry a raw, political force, and indeed he's quite terrifying, and the novel will leave many readers baffled and disturbed.In a word, this book is surreal, and when read from a surrealist's perspective, the book falls neatly into place for me. A central, philosophical question is this: is Mersault stark-raving mad, or is the world? And if it's the latter, is this murderer in fact sane? What does this say about morality and ethics? Camus doesn't want us laugh at his protagonist as we do Dostoevsky's underground man; we might agree with him instead. As surrealist Andre Breton would say, Mursealth is above "conscious moral or aesthetic self-censorship," where the convicted becomes society's accuser. The crowd is lost in self-serving hypcrisy and delusion, and only Mersault has the wit and integrity to tell them. In this way, Camus argues for his protagnonist's sanity and ethical grounding as he delivers a dark, foreboding message from the cell of an Algerian prison.The author's sillogism goes something like this: life's unhappy and then we die. Life shouldn't be unhappy, even though we're going to die. Therefore, if we want to be happy, we must embrace death. Like all arguments, this one makes assumptions: people aren't happy, people can't find happiness in the absence of embracing death (such as through spiritual faith). Mersault shouts out his disgust with a rotten world and finds solace in it; he does this in a kind of self-declaration, where he's entitled to speak for himself if he so pleases. In true, post-modern style, Camus suggests we listen to his maverick. Surrealists typically embrace the idiosyncratic and individual while rejecting all forms of group-think--even to the point of refusing to define insane. So no irony is intended when Salvador Dali declares, "There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad." This is Mersault.Surrealism was popular in Camus's France during the 20th century, but as a reader I nevertheless need to ask whether Mursealt is mad. Mersault is a man of acute awareness struggling in an insane world. This man can murder without contrition, and when the crowd screams out ugly bile in response, they speak with a twisted--but elegant--harmony on the matter of life's cruel nature. In this there's universal solice, and Mersault's individual, relative reality is conjoined with the universal's. Having come full circle, we're left in a moral conundrum where murder is sane. Now Camus has trapped us.Or has he? It's difficult to laugh at Mersault since he's so disturbing. So I approached this question of Mersault's sanity by evaluating the argument, a dangerous foray inside a man's matrix. But this is precisely where Camus failed, in my view--a wry commentary on a book that was so beautifully constructed atop the human intellect. Kierkegaard avoided the trap of self-declaration when he acknowledged a universal idea of the ethical before allowing a need for a telelogical (i.e., with a purpose) suspension of that ethical, and only as a true act of faith. Mersault has no faith, and his suspension of the ethical is purposeless. That is, he has not placed his transgression on the shoulders of a higher authority. Faith is a paradox, Kierkegaard says, and a moral individual will transcend the ethical only on faith that a higher authority will intervene in this life. Mersault absolves himself of such consequences, and as such, morally disconnects himself from the world of mankind. If this is not a form of madness, then what is? I think the argument collapses here: what's missing in The Stranger is layering. Dostoevksy, too, on the other hand, layers his argument vis-à-vis artistic distancing by presenting his anti-hero in the form of parody. Knowing this, can't we begin to smile at Mersault's self-certain simplicity, despite the internal logic of his argument? The elements of paradox and mockery are not present in The Stranger, but should be.It's a shame. The 20th century was the most violent and ideologically deranged century in human history. This is a great novel and an excellent read, but like so much literature of that era, The Stranger said more about the world in which it was written than perhaps was intended.My TitlesShadow FieldsSnooker Glen

There’s good and bad in the book. The best part is the protagonist’s acceptance of present reality without harsh judgment, and appreciation for beauty in all things some of them bad. The bad part is the protagonist acts without forethought when he murders someone. In doing so he destroys the lives of his victim, the victim’s, family, and the victim’s friends. This form of nihilism I cannot accept. I’m truly happy to have been born into a family that gave me the gift of faith.

Great teaf

My favorite Camus novel for sure. This was a reread for me (the first time being in high school) and I enjoyed it again! The writing is simple to understand but definitely leaves you pondering. Always a good refresher of absurdism.

It might be my favorite book, that was a gift, I read the french version and the cover was different, but I really liked this cover and texture of the book.

A story needs a hero. Camus tells a story well enough, and I have no real faults with the translation, but the protagonist, Meursault, is no hero. This book has been over-reviewed, but I am adding to the plethora of comments anyway.Reading this book as an adult, I can only conclude that the author and the protagonist were both quite functional though severely depressed, and as this book is a part of our education system from high school to college, I hope readers have the sense to realize that, and not merely think "ooooh, iconoclasm and nihilism and sadness -- how smart and profound!"The only way Meursault could have been the way he was, was not so much his being a sociopath, but rather because of an overriding, long-term depression. He was sensitive, yet insensitive. Self-absorbed to the maximum, yet a participant in life as a social being. Kind and polite, yet apathetic to the point of shooting someone dead because the sun was too hot and he wasn't feeling quite well, and not experiencing any pangs of conscience later.Those who cling to the idea that Meursault was evil have their points, but I stick to my depression diagnosis (as a non-psychologist!) noting his conversation with the priest near the end, as he was coming near his date with the guillotine, and Meursault burst out with a rant including, basically, saying "life is terrible and everybody knows it". Looking at the story as a whole, that was how he always felt. That expression really becomes the basis for the book, but not as a vaguely Buddhist realization, but the final "tell" that this man always felt this way, and it was the overwhelming, chronic sadness that made him who he was, and do what he did. Was he sad at his mother's funeral? He was sad all his life, or at least all his adult life, so why would even a loss that profound register? The man was just gone. He tried to be a nice guy, and was somehow functional. He worked. He was never belligerent. He sought happiness in the one basic way that was left to him: the company of a woman. But he was clearly warped into super apathy by his disorder.Meursault's (Camus's) conclusion was acceptance and defiance in the face of the misery of life, as he planned to march to his death and hope there was a big crowd to see it and cheer for his blood. An Existentialist might pick up on this as a call to arms, to be stoic if not aggressive in the face of the pain of life and spit in its face; but the fact that this story was expressed to the public, and the public accepted it as literature and philosophy rather than a cry for help, was nothing more than a sort of reification of the cliche that misery loves company.