Novel: The Stranger

Overview
Albert Camus's The Stranger is a spare, unsettling novel set in French-colonial Algiers and narrated by Meursault, an office clerk whose emotional reticence and literal-minded honesty estrange him from social expectations. Told in a flat, direct voice, the story traces how an ordinary sequence of events spirals into a murder and a trial, exposing the gap between experience as Meursault lives it and the moral narratives society demands. The book’s two-part structure moves from an almost sun-dazzled drift through daily life to the confined, theatrical space of judgment, where Meursault’s refusal to feign feelings becomes more damning than the crime itself.

Plot
The novel opens with Meursault receiving a telegram announcing his mother’s death. He attends the vigil and funeral with minimal outward emotion, bothered mostly by heat, light, and fatigue. The next day he swims, begins a casual romance with a former coworker, Marie, and returns to his ordinary routines. He befriends Raymond, a coarse neighbor involved in a violent relationship, and, without moral qualms, helps him write a letter meant to manipulate his mistress. After a scuffle between Raymond and a group of Arab men, Meursault joins Raymond and a friend at a seaside bungalow. On the beach, under a blazing sun, they encounter the men again. Later, Meursault wanders back alone, revolver in hand, and, overwhelmed by glare, heat, and the pounding surf, fires once at an Arab man, then four more times.

Part Two follows Meursault in prison and on trial. He adjusts to confinement with an almost animal pragmatism, training his body and mind to the cell’s routines. The proceedings focus less on the shooting’s circumstances than on his character: his indifference at his mother’s funeral, his atheism, his pleasure-seeking. The prosecutor crafts a moral tale in which Meursault’s failure to cry becomes proof of monstrousness. His lawyer urges him to perform remorse, but Meursault resists dissembling and remains literal, provoking the jury’s outrage. He is convicted and sentenced to death. Awaiting execution, he refuses the prison chaplain’s invitation to faith, exploding in a final outburst that strips away consolation and reveals, to him, the world’s radical indifference. In that recognition he feels a fierce clarity and a sudden kinship with existence, wishing for a crowd to greet his end with cries of hate.

Themes and Context
The novel dramatizes the absurd: the clash between a human desire for meaning and a world that offers none. Meursault does not deny feeling; he experiences the body’s sensations intensely, but he rejects the fictions, grief performed on cue, guilt spoken to satisfy a script, that confer social meaning. His crime is read less as an act than as evidence of moral deficiency, turning the courtroom into a stage where stories are more decisive than facts.

Colonial Algeria forms a charged backdrop. The victim is never named, identified only as an Arab, reflecting a hierarchy that devalues certain lives. The blinding sun and scorching heat function almost as characters, pressing on bodies and choices, blurring intention and accident. The legal system’s concern with ceremony over truth mirrors the colonial order’s abstractions.

Style and Significance
Camus’s terse prose, clipped observations, and focus on surfaces create a narrator who neither explains nor embellishes, compelling readers to confront their own need for motives and lessons. The title signals Meursault’s status as an outsider, not only to society but to the narratives people use to domesticate death and contingency. The result is a stark, enduring meditation on freedom, responsibility, and the cost of refusing comforting lies.