“Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure. The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday.
The Home for Aged Persons is at Marengo, some fifty miles from Algiers. With the two o’clock bus I should get there well before nightfall. Then I can spend the night there, keeping the usual vigil beside the body, and be back here by tomorrow evening. I have fixed up with my employer for two days’ leave; obviously, under the circumstances, he couldn’t refuse. Still, I had an idea he looked annoyed, and I said, without thinking: “Sorry, sir, but it’s not my fault, you know.”
Afterwards it struck me I needn’t have said that. I had no reason to excuse myself; it was up to him to express his sympathy and so forth. Probably he will do so the day after tomorrow, when he sees me in black. For the present, it’s almost as if Mother weren’t really dead. The funeral will bring it home to me, put an official seal on it, so to speak. …”
This is the opening passage of L’Étranger or The Stranger (sometimes called The Outsider), the novella written by Albert Camus and first time published in 1942. This is the debut of Camus as an existentialist. This novel serves as an existentialist manifesto, distilling complex philosophical themes for a general audience.
While some may have read The Stranger and others may not, I will begin with a brief summary of its plot before turning to a more detailed analysis.
Meursault, a petty French official living in the Algiers suburbs, learns of his mother’s death. Three years ago, unable to support her on his modest salary, he placed her in The Home for Aged Persons (almshouse which is simply being called The Home in the text). Having received a two-week vacation, Meursault goes to the funeral the same day.
After a brief conversation with the director of the Home, Meursault is going to spend the night at his mother’s coffin. However, he refuses to look at the deceased for the last time, talks for a long time with the watchman, calmly drinks coffee with milk and smokes, and then falls asleep. Waking up, he sees his mother’s friends from the Home nearby, and it seems to him that they have come to judge him. The next morning, under the scorching sun, Meursault indifferently buries his mother and returns to Algiers.
After sleeping for at least twelve hours, Meursault decides to go to the sea for a swim and accidentally meets a former typist from his office, Marie Cardona. That same evening, she becomes his mistress. Having spent the next day at the window of his room overlooking the main street of the suburbs, Meursault thinks that, in essence, nothing has changed in his life.
The next day, returning home after work, Meursault meets neighbours: the old man Salamano, as always, with his dog, and Raymond Sintes, a storekeeper who is reputed to be a pimp. Sintes wants to teach a lesson to his mistress, an Arab woman who cheated on him, and asks Meursault to compose a letter for her in order to lure her on a date and then beat her. Soon, Meursault witnesses Raymond’s violent quarrel with his mistress, in which the police intervene, and agrees to act as a witness in his favour.
The patron, the boss, offers Meursault a new assignment to Paris, but he refuses: life still cannot be changed. That same evening, Marie asks Meursault if he is going to marry her. Like promotion, Meursault is not interested in this.
Marie came that evening and asked me if I’d marry her. I said I didn’t mind; if she was keen on it, we’d get married. Then she asked me again if I loved her. I replied, much as before, that her question meant nothing or next to nothing—but I supposed I didn’t.“If that’s how you feel,” she said, “why marry me?” I explained that it had no importance really, but, if it would give her pleasure, we could get married right away. I pointed out that, anyhow, the suggestion came from her; as for me, I’d merely said, “Yes.”
Then she remarked that marriage was a serious matter.
To which I answered: “No.”
She kept silent after that, staring at me in a curious way. Then she asked: “Suppose another girl had asked you to marry her—I mean, a girl you liked in the
same way as you like me—would you have said ‘Yes’ to her, too?”
“Naturally.”
Sunday Meursault is going to spend on the seashore with Marie and Raymond visiting his friend Masson. Approaching the bus stop, Raymond and Meursault notice two Arabs, one of whom is the brother of Raymond’s mistress. This meeting disturbs them.
After swimming and a hearty breakfast, Masson invites his friends to take a walk along the seashore. At the end of the beach, they notice two Arabs in blue dungarees. They think the Arabs have tracked them down. A fight breaks out, one of the Arabs cuts Raymond with a knife. They soon retreat and flee.
After some time, Meursault and his friends come to the beach again and see the same Arabs behind a high rock. Raymond gives Meursault a revolver, but there is no apparent reason for a quarrel. The world seemed to have closed and bound them. Friends leave Meursault alone. The scorching heat presses on him, he is seized by a drunken stupor. At the stream behind the rock, he again notices the Arab who wounded Raymond. Unable to endure the unbearable heat, Meursault takes a step forward, takes out a revolver and shoots at the Arab, “as if knocking on the door of misfortune with four short blows.”
Meursault is arrested and summoned for interrogation several times. He considers his case very simple, but the investigator and the lawyer have a different opinion. The investigator, who seemed to Meursault as an intelligent and likeable person, cannot understand the motives for his crime. He starts a conversation with him about God, but Meursault confesses his disbelief. His own crime causes him only annoyance.
The investigation continues for eleven months. Meursault understands that the prison cell has become his home and his life has stopped. At first, he is mentally still at large, but after a meeting with Marie, a change occurs in his soul. Languishing from boredom, he recalls the past and understands that a person who has lived at least one day will be able to spend at least a hundred years in prison – he will have enough memories. Gradually Meursault loses the concept of time.
The Meursault case is scheduled for hearing at the final session of the jury. A lot of people are crowded in the stuffy hall, but Meursault is not able to distinguish a single face. He gets the strange impression that he is superfluous, like an uninvited guest. After a long interrogation of witnesses: the director and caretaker of the almshouse, Raymond, Masson, Salamano and Marie, the prosecutor pronounces an angry conclusion: Meursault, never crying at the funeral of his own mother, not wanting to look at the deceased, the next day enters into a relationship with a woman and, being a friend of a professional pimp, he commits murder for an insignificant reason, settling scores with his victim. According to the prosecutor, Meursault has no soul, human feelings are inaccessible to him, no moral principles are known. Horrified by the insensibility of the criminal, the prosecutor demands the death penalty for him.
In his defence speech, the lawyer Meursault, on the contrary, calls him an honest worker and an exemplary son, who supported his mother as long as possible, and killed himself in a moment of blindness. Meursault expects the most severe punishment – inescapable regret and remorse.
After a break, the chairman of the court announces the verdict: “on behalf of the French people,” Meursault will be beheaded in public, in the square. Meursault begins to wonder if he can avoid the mechanical course of events. He cannot accept the inevitability of what is happening. Soon, however, he comes to terms with the thought of death, because life is not worth clinging to, and if you have to die, it does not matter when and how it happens.
Before the execution, a priest comes to Meursault’s cell. But in vain he tries to turn him to God. For Meursault, eternal life does not make any sense, he does not want to spend the rest of his time on God, so he pours out all the accumulated indignation on the priest.
On the threshold of death, Meursault feels a breath of darkness rise up to him from the abyss of the future, that he was chosen by a single fate. He is ready to relive everything and opens his soul to the gentle indifference of the world.
A Review
The Stranger is considered a classic of 20th-century literature and has been republished many times and remains popular also today. In France, the Stranger is a ranked No. 1 in the Le Monde newspaper ranks on its 100 Books of the Century list.
Great summary for The Stranger is given by Sartre: “the novel tells the story of a man, Mersault, who reacts to his mother’s death by going swimming, starting a futile affair, seeing a film, killing a man “because of the sun,” and then stating on the night before his execution that he is happy and hopes a large crowd will “welcome him with cries of hatred” at the scaffold.”
He continues: “Between each phrase,” continues Sartre, “the world is destroyed and reborn: the word, as soon as it arises, is creation out of nothing; the phrase “Stranger / outsider” is an island. And we jump from phrase to phrase, from non-existence to non-existence.
We must grasp the time period in which the work was written. Two of the worst wars in human history are taking place in the twentieth century. The 20th century reveals to the people the first experience of world wars. These tragic events leave a tangible imprint on art, literature, music and philosophy. The work of Camus is on the verge of literature and philosophy.
Camus touches on painful topics of the 20th century in his creation:
• The meaning of life and nihilism;
• “Death of God”, rebellion (the image of Prometheus), heroism;
• Choosiness;
• Religious Crisis and Faith;
• Criticism of Christianity and anti-clericalism;
• Permissiveness and authenticity of choice;
• Criticism of habitual moral norms;
• The absurdity of existence and reality;
• Fatalism.
Written alongside The Myth of Sisyphus, The Stranger shares many overlapping themes. Camus grasped the mood of his time. He believed that to live means to explore the absurd, to rebel against it.
Camus defines life as a process characterized by absurdity, rebellion and freedom.
The philosopher wrote: “I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death—and I refuse suicide.”
Camus defines the Absurd as a “spiritual disease of the twentieth century”. Remember the quote from The Myth of Sisyphus: “Rising, street-car, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, street-car, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm”.
This is the nakedness of man in the face of the absurd.
Camus in his work and thanks to the protagonist Meursault sees life as an irrational repetition, there is nothing new. Meursault perceives the world as an irrational element in which everything is repeated and thus he feels himself an outsider.
Meursault will not only lose his love for life, but also perceives it as absurdity and irrationality. In addition to the absurdity in the work of Camus, there is another motive of existentialism – freedom. Freedom from all social norms.
The skies are empty, the world is irrational. We must build our own truth. There is his own idea of good and evil. Camus writes about absolute freedom.
We know that in the existential philosophy, a person is responsible for his actions when he acts freely, freedom is also defined as a choice that a person makes in accordance with his existential truth: “We are condemned to be free. We are thrown into freedom. Truly there is only one who freely chooses, is the creation of his own choice … It is free choice that creates personality. To be means to choose yourself.
One of the other main themes of the book is loneliness. The hero of the story leads an isolated life, which, however, includes sensual pleasures. The man loves the sun, which will play a fatal role in the work.
The protagonist Meursault is a Dionysian man. The Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus as emblems of two fundamental forces of human nature were framed by Nietzsche, where Apollo represents forces related to order and logic while Dionysus is related to chaos and irrationality.
Friedrich Nietzsche alongside Russian writer had a huge influence on the aesthetic formation of the worldview and worldview of Camus, especially on the understanding and perception of the “Absurdity”. Although Camus himself refused to be an existentialist: “I am not a philosopher and never aspired to become one … I only speak about what I experienced”.
Meursault emerges as a self-disclosure of the spirit of the absurd, and the values of any non-absurd culture are alien to him. Throughout the whole novel, he tells “I don’t care”. Indifferent attitude. No matter how you slice life, you can’t change it. A sober awareness of life as a loss.
Although Meursault narrates his mother’s death with apparent indifference (remember the beginning of the novel: “MOTHER died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure) – in fact, he has a secret passion: to hit as hard as possible according to the moral sense of the reader, to shock him and thereby achieve the necessary effect – to convince everyone of his extraneousness. This desire is fraught with a catch. It is not the very existence of the outsider that causes doubt, but his persistent reminders of his outsiderness.
In the novel’s final lines, Meursault almost performs for the audience, inviting them to witness his execution. This deliberate act makes him elusive, preventing a straightforward moral judgment and leaving the reader unsettled. The novel is not just a narrative—it is a puzzle.
Camus concludes: “Those who read in The Stranger will not be much mistaken as the story of a man who, without any heroic pose, agrees to die in the name of truth.”
Camus turns Meursault in the process of his confrontation with society not only into an ideologue of the absurd, but also into a martyr. Adam becomes Christ (“the only Christ we deserve,” according to Camus himself), the judges become Pharisees.
In the preface to the American edition of the novel, written in the 1950s, Camus basically formulates the key idea of the book that “In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death. I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game.” – “He refuses to lie. Lying is not just saying something that isn’t really there. It is also, and mainly, to say more than it really is, and as far as the human heart is concerned, to say more than to feel … Contrary to appearances, Meursault does not want to simplify life. He says what he has, he refuses to hide his feelings, and now society feels threatened.”
Camus dismissed existentialists like Jaspers, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard, arguing that nothing can transcend life’s absurdity. Sartre, on the other hand, had spent years working through the phenomenology of Heidegger and Husserl until he synthesized them in Being and Nothingness into a work that sought to penetrate the very nature of being
In addition to existentialist themes, Camus gently weaves in the colonial reality. He places his story within an occupied Algeria where hidden tensions between French-Algerians and Arabs exist quietly underneath. Yet just like Meursault’s lack of concern for his own destiny, the work doesn’t dwell on these issues openly—it merely presents them and lets the reader decide their significance. This silence, the refusal to engage in moral arguments or overt social critique, reflects the novel’s broader absurdist worldview.
Camus leaves us with no answers, no final moral lesson—only the awareness that Meursault’s fate, much like our own, unfolds within an indifferent world. And in that silent confrontation with the absurd, perhaps we too are forced to ask: if nothing truly matters, how then shall we live?
Max Karlin, 2022
Adapted from my presentation for the seminar on Existential Philosophy and Psychotherapy at the New School Of Psychotherapy And Counselling (NSPC) and Middlesex University, London, Autumn, 2022.
