The Stranger — Albert Camus

A brief review

My first encounter with The Stranger was in high school. It was part of a literature project that entailed books by Albert Camus, Nigel Barley, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and other writers who devoted their careers to the untrodden and unorthodox, not only philosophically, but also culturally and geographically. Back then, in my late teens and primarily concerned with finishing the book on time, I ploughed through it without absorbing the deeper philosophical concepts that this novel so beautifully portrays. Now, stuck at home in the midst of a global pandemic and plenty of time on my hands, I decided to revisit this classic again.

Throughout the book, Camus’s philosophical tenets of absurdity and existentialism are clearly shining through. In essence, absurdity here refers to humanity’s futile attempt to impose meaning and rationality on a meaningless and irrational universe. This concept is reflected by the behavior and thoughts of Meursault, the main character in the novel. His external world is governed by emotionless observations of his physical surroundings, albeit sometimes quite detailed in nature. This becomes clear after the first two sentences of the book: “My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.”

Moreover, he does not seem to find particular joy in anything other than the scent of flowers carried by…