‘The Stranger’: The Indifference of the World

A review of ‘The Stranger’, by Albert Camus; Gallimard, 1942.

Albert Camus’s The Stranger opens under a beating sun with the immortal lines ‘Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.’ (‘Today, mother died. Or perhaps yesterday, I don’t know.’) The story follows Meursault, a man detached from life. He attends his mother’s funeral but feels no grief; he starts up a fling, but cares little for the woman. A trivial spat with an acquaintance, Raymond, leads him to meet an Arab on a beach. Meursault shoots him in an instance of complete disinterest, driven less by rage than boredom and the sun.

The second half of the novel centres on his trial. But his crime is not so much murder as defiance. Meursault’s refusal to conform to the norms of his culture is what vexes and unsettles. Not to cry at his mother’s funeral is as bad as murder. (‘In our society, any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death’, wrote Camus in 1955.) Certainly, it is disturbing. But for Meursault, life is absurd: there is no good reason to take things seriously. If he does not lie it is not because he is moral but because it makes no difference what he says. Good, bad, right, wrong, true, false—these are irrelevant, in the end. Consider, in contrast, Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov.

Meursault’s refusal to conform to the norms of his society is what vexes and unsettles.

If life lacks intrinsic meaning, then why do we persist in searching for it? This is the question with which Camus wrestles. Meursault embodies an outlook marked by a recognition of life’s pointlessness and a refusal to take part. The sun, beating down ceaselessly on Algeria, reflects the cosmic disinterest that Meursault and Camus perceive. Its intensity and omnipresence brings the shortness of our lives and unimportance of our values into focus. That Meursault sees this distances him from others. He is a stranger to his friends, lovers, family, local customs and cultural traditions; but he is also a stranger to himself. He is cut off from his feelings and his instinct to survive. By rejecting expectations—grief about his mother, remorse about his crime (Meursault merely says he is ‘annoyed’), the wish for redemption—he exposes the randomness of convention and the norms that rule our lives.

Camus was very taken with Hemingway and his prose is spare to the point of skeletal. It reflects Meursault’s detached worldview. But beneath the starkness and simplicity of the writing is real philosophical heft. Critics have fussed endlessly over (ironically) the meaning The Stranger. Scholars have even accused Camus of having a poor understanding of his own text. The strength of the storytelling lies in its restraint, in its focus on cause and effect, in Camus’s disinterest in moralising or idealising. The sun, the sea, the sand—this natural imagery, vividly but not floridly depicted, is enough to keep the philosophical in the foreground.

Scholars have accused Camus of having a poor understanding of his own text.

Some choose to see Meursault as autistic or even psychopathic. Others see him as depressed. Certainly he exhibits the ‘flat affect’ of those in their number. But I do not think these takes on The Stranger hold up to close study, and the ending of the book puts such ideas to bed. They reflect a quite modern preoccupation, almost a desperation, to explain away the individual mind by labelling it. And the fragile sense of self to which liberal (read: loose) societies give rise moves us to crave clear descriptions. A cursory browse of social media yields plenty of evidence that we want to be put in a box. But Meursault, in my view, is not ‘other’ due to neuroatypicality, or an impaired mirror neuron system, or disruption to the neurotransmitters. He has simply come to see, like the characters of Waiting for Godot, that all existence is pointless, and acts rationally, that is, in a way that is reasonable if one’s basic belief is that nothing matters.

But it is not the only way to respond to the world’s perceived indifference. That is key. Indeed The Stranger is a working-out of a thought experiment: if one were to discover, or conclude, that the world were meaningless, what ought one to do? In The Myth of Sisyphus, released the same year The Stranger was published, Camus explored this idea more directly, stating that ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.’ Ought Sisyphus, condemned to rolls a boulder up the hill only for it to roll down again, to end his life? Ought we, condemned to live in a world without meaning, to end ours? The ending of The Stranger hints at one answer to that question.