My goal is to read a novel a week in 2015. I’ve made it to seven.
-Albert Camus, The Stranger
Meursault, the main character of this story, is indifferent to life for the most part. He doesn’t really care if he’s married or single. He’s not overly invested in a career. He is simply surviving. He places his mother in a nursing home. She dies. He never sheds a tear. He goes on about his business. It’s just life. He’s not in the business of analyzing himself. He probably couldn’t if he tried. He is what he is.
Then, due to strange circumstances, he finds himself in the position to kill someone who had threatened the life of a friend. He shoots him in cold blood. His arrest and trial commences. He has no explanation for why he shot the man.
Camus paints the picture of a trial in which those who would prosecute Meursault are constantly imposing arbitrary motives and demeanor to him. He’s the type of man who doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral. He must be evil. He is sentenced to death – a martyr of indifference.
Camus, by all accounts, is displaying his idea of the absurd. People don’t necessarily know why they do what they do. Perhaps they are trying to construct arbitrary meaning to their lives by doing so. In reality, for Camus, there is no rationality; there is no meaning. When someone acknowledges this, and lives accordingly, society imposes its own meaning upon their lives. The ‘stranger’ is one who lives life in accordance with reality, which is absurdity and meaninglessness, and finds himself a foreigner upon whom society must thrust its artificial constructs.
The story is a page-turner to be sure; more so than The Fall. Camus’ ideas are interesting. Though I believe firmly that his overall idea is ultimately wrong, I see truth in it. It is wrong ‘under heaven,’ but absolutely right ‘under the sun.’
