The Stranger by Albert Camus

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Rating: 4/5, good

I read this in high school and all I remembered was that he didn’t cry at his mom’s funeral and he shot a guy because it was too sunny.

I picked this up to reread on a trip because it’s small (a little over 100 pages) and I was in the mood for some absurdism/existential philosophy.

I got pretty much the same impression reading it the second time as I did the first, although two other things stood out to me:

1. The incident with the dog made me laugh harder than it should.

Basically, an old man named Salamano has a dog that he hates. He takes it everywhere he goes but he’s constantly insulting it and he won’t stop to let it pee so it ends up dribbling behind itself as they walk. Even though he insults and mistreats the dog, he can’t live without it and cries when it gets lost, though he’s too proud to go to the pound and get it back. This reminds me of a lot of relationships that I’ve been in or witnessed. Sometimes when we’re close with someone it can get hard to see past the little surface annoyances and recognize how important that person is to us. Sometimes even when we don’t like that person, we get used to them being there and grieve when they go away.

This psychological stupid human thing makes me laugh because it’s just so silly (and it’s the kind of thing that if I didn’t laugh, I would cry…).

2. I didn’t really understand the situation with Raymond and his girlfriend the first time.

Meursault (the main character) meets this guy named Raymond who lives in the same apartment building. Raymond has a girlfriend who he says cheated on him, and he wants Meursault to write a letter to her to make her feel sorry for what she’s done. He’s planning to have sex with her and then spit in her face at the last second. Later, after Mersault writes the letter, they have sex, and he spits in her face, she gets mad and slaps him, but then he starts beating her and the police come and break it up… then some Arabic men (family and friends of Raymond’s ex-girlfriend) start following Raymond, which is what leads to the fight on the beach between the French men and the Arabic men.

The whole situation with the murder on the beach is also very hard to understand, even on second reading… Is Mersault’s shooting the Arabic guy meant to be a product of fate or an exercise of free will?

The situation is extreme so it’s hard for readers to relate to, but can you think of a time when you acted on impulse, and did something wrong that felt right at the time?

I remember in college once I pushed a pumpkin off a balcony. We were just standing there talking, me, my partner, and my friend, and I just suddenly got a strange urge to knock it down. If I had to say what was going through my head, it’s that I was bored and the pumpkin just looked so perfect and precarious and I wanted to see what would happen if it fell. I don’t know what fantastic thing I was expecting to happen, but the pumpkin hit the ground with a wet “thump” and my friends laughed because it was so sudden and unexpected. 

Well, I just read a couple more articles about this and it sounds like there’s not really supposed to be a reason that Mersault shoots the man as much as it’s absurd in the way the world is also absurd. Camus’s philosophy is that there’s no reason behind things. Humans try to make things fit into a narrative like the court does during the trial, but really there’s no reason for any of it; it just is. When Mersault realizes this, he is free to reject the narratives thrust on him and create his own, as he does in the famous last line:

“For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.”

This isn’t that he wants to be executed (any more than any of us wants to die), but he accepts the inevitability of death and commits to enjoying the pleasures left to him.

That’s all that a human can do…

I was originally going to give this a 3 because I didn’t find it that entertaining and didn’t get it, but now that I understand the idea behind it a little bit more, I have a bit of appreciation for it. However, as interesting as the concept of absurdism is, it’s pretty widely-known in the 21^st century so it doesn’t feel revolutionary as it probably did when this was first published. I’ll give it a 4 because it is really well-constructed in how strongly it resists allowing the reader imposing their own meaning on Mersault’s actions.

I’d like to note that it does contain a lot of racism and sexism that I feel can make it even more difficult and uncomfortable for modern readers to get through. Mersault is a stoic man that never shows his emotions. He’s even so scared of emotions that the reason he goes back to the beach with the gun is that he can’t endure the women’s crying. He can’t let himself feel that emotion, so he goes out to the beach and shoots a man… wait, maybe I’m imposing too much modern meaning on it. 😉