The Stranger

Albert Camus · 1942

Premise

A young clerk in French Algiers, who feels and says only what he actually feels, kills an Arab man on a beach almost without reason and is condemned to death less for the killing than for his failure to show the emotions society expects; the novel asks what happens to someone who refuses to pretend that life has a meaning it does not have.

This guide discusses the whole plot, including the ending.

The main ideas

Life has no meaning given from outside it. Albert Camus called the clash between our demand for meaning and the world's silence the absurd.
Much social life is performance: expected feelings, expressed on cue.
A person who refuses to perform is treated as a threat, whatever else they have done.
Institutions judge people by the story they can tell about them, not by the facts.
Honesty about one's feelings can coexist with moral blindness.
Facing the indifference of the universe without false hope can bring a kind of peace.

The indifferent man

Albert Camus published L'Étranger in 1942, the same year as The Myth of Sisyphus, his essay on the absurd. It appeared in English as The Stranger in the United States and The Outsider in Britain.

Its narrator, Meursault, is a clerk in Algiers, then part of French-ruled Algeria. The novel opens with the news that his mother has died in an old people's home. He travels to the vigil, smokes, drinks coffee with milk beside her coffin and does not cry. The next day he goes swimming, meets a former colleague, Marie Cardona, sees a comic film with her and begins an affair.

Meursault is not cruel. He simply reports what he feels, which is often very little, and declines to claim feelings he does not have. When Marie asks whether he loves her, he says it doesn't mean anything but that he probably doesn't. When she asks him to marry her, he says it makes no difference to him, but he will if she wants.

Implication: notice how much of ordinary life consists of saying what is expected rather than what is true.

The killing

Meursault drifts into a friendship with his neighbor Raymond Sintès, a pimp, and agrees to write a letter that Raymond uses to lure back and beat his mistress, an Arab woman. Her brother and his friends begin following Raymond.

On a Sunday at a friend's beach house, the men clash with the Arabs, and Raymond is cut with a knife. Later, Meursault walks back along the beach alone, carrying Raymond's revolver. He comes upon one of the Arabs resting by a spring. The heat is crushing and the light blinding. The man draws a knife, the sun flashes off the blade into Meursault's eyes, and he fires. Then he fires four more shots into the motionless body.

Meursault cannot later explain why. He tells the court it was because of the sun.

The mechanism is that a man who acts from immediate sensation rather than from principle can do something terrible without any motive he could name.

Implication: actions without reasons are still actions, and the absence of a motive does not remove responsibility.

The trial

The second half of the novel follows Meursault through prison and trial. The examining magistrate, a devout man, waves a crucifix at him and demands that he repent. Meursault says he does not believe in God, and the magistrate comes to call him Monsieur Antichrist.

At the trial, the prosecution argues that the killing was premeditated, but it builds its case above all on Meursault's character. It calls witnesses from the old people's home to testify that Meursault did not cry at his mother's funeral, smoked and drank coffee beside her body, and began an affair the next day. The prosecutor argues that he buried his mother with a criminal heart, and that a man without a soul is a danger to society. Meursault is sentenced to be beheaded in a public square.

Camus later summed up the novel, in a preface for an American edition, as the story of a man condemned because he does not play the game.

The mechanism is that a court, like a society, needs a story that makes a crime intelligible, and when the accused will not supply one, it constructs one from the defendant's character.

Implication: be wary when judgment of a person rests on whether they showed the expected emotions.

The chaplain

In his cell, awaiting execution, Meursault repeatedly refuses to see the prison chaplain. When the chaplain comes anyway and urges him to turn to God, Meursault erupts, seizing him and shouting that none of the chaplain's certainties is worth one strand of a woman's hair, and that he, Meursault, has been right about his life.

The outburst empties him. Afterward, looking at the night sky, he opens himself for the first time to what he calls the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so like himself, he feels that he had been happy and that he is happy again. He hopes only that on the day of his execution there will be a large crowd to greet him with cries of hate.

The mechanism is that once Meursault gives up hope of meaning or rescue, he is free to accept his life as it was, without regret.

Implication: Camus suggests that facing the absence of meaning honestly can bring peace, rather than despair, to someone who stops looking for consolation.

The absurd

Behind the novel stands Camus's philosophy. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he defines the absurd as the confrontation between the human need for meaning and a universe that offers none. He rejects both suicide and religious faith as escapes from it, and argues instead for living fully in full awareness of it.

Meursault is not a philosopher, but he lives the absurd before he understands it. He refuses the consolations everyone around him relies on: grief displays, ambition, love declarations, repentance. Society cannot tolerate his refusal, because it exposes how much of its order depends on shared pretense.

The mechanism is that a person who refuses shared fictions threatens the people who rely on them, and they respond by casting that person out.

Implication: consider which shared fictions you depend on, and how you treat people who decline to share them.

Where it falls short

Its victim has no name. The Arab whom Meursault kills is never named or given an inner life, and critics including Edward Said have argued that the novel reflects the blind spots of French colonial Algeria. Kamel Daoud's novel The Meursault Investigation (2013) retells the story from the dead man's brother's side.
Its trial is weighted to make a point. By having the court dwell on Meursault's behavior at the funeral more than on the killing, the novel shifts sympathy away from the fact that he shot a man five times.
Its hero is a thought experiment more than a person. Meursault's near-total lack of emotion serves the philosophy, which limits what the novel can show about real people's moral lives.

Crime and Punishment — a murderer transformed by guilt, the opposite of Meursault's indifference.
Less Than Zero — a modern narrator whose emotional emptiness reflects his world.