The Stranger

Meursault, a French Algerian clerk, shoots an unnamed Arab man on a beach at Algiers and is tried — as the novel presents it — less for the killing than for having failed to weep at his mother’s funeral. It is the founding narrative of what Camus called the absurd, and the flat first-person voice is the whole technique.

The anonymity of the victim is the standing criticism of the book and not a small one: Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation (2013) retells the story from the dead man’s family’s side, and that reading now travels with the novel.

Context: Albert Camus (1913-1960) published L’Étranger in 1942 alongside the essay The Myth of Sisyphus. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957.

Connections

• Albert Camus — the author.
• Moral Philosophy — what the trial scene is actually about.
• Human Nature
• Literature