Existential Nihilism In The Stranger By Albert Camus

Kamryn Fisher

Mr. Sapakie

Ap English 12

The Stranger works in translation

17 December, 2017

Existential Nihilism in the book The Stranger

Albert Camus, the author of the book The Stranger ambiguously shows the reader his opinion on existential nihilism. Existential nihilism is the philosophy that life has no intrinsic meaning, and rejects all religious and moral conformity. The main character meursault, displays all of these traits throughout the book. Camus gives the reader an alternative outlook on the life and how there is no right or wrong way of living because in the end, whether that be sooner or later everyone is going to have the same end fate. Camus demonstrated his belief of existential nihilism through the external and internal

“Asking me if i believed in god. I said no. he sat down indignantly. He said it was impossible; all men believed in God, even those who turned their backs on him” (Camus 69). Camus uses the theme of religion to show how it truly is absurd. God was created by religious people as a way of giving a sense of fulfillment to a meaningless life. Meursault choses to deny himself of faith because religion only seizes to control others. Camus had said “I don’t believe in reason enough, to believe in a system. What interests me is knowing how we must behave, and more precisely, how to behave when one does not believe in God or reason” (Camus 1965,1427). In the book Meursault was questioned about his faith by the magistrate, after he told the magistrate he did not believe in God the magistrate was in denial and told him that it is impossible for a man to live without faith. Camus opposes religion because it denies the life of true free will and gives pseudo-solutions to the absurd nature of

“... I squeezed my hand around the revolver. The trigger gave;...I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day. The exceptional silence of a beach where I’d been happy. Then I fired four more times at a motionless body” (Camus, 59). Most in modern or really any time, would find that murdering an innocent, for simply the reason of “because why not” very odd, but Camus expresses his true feelings on the unimportance of life through this murder. In all of Camus works, he questions the absurdity of human existence, but one of his works really questioned the importance of human lives, in the book The Rebel, Camus answers the question with the phrase of “why should i not kill others”. This all ties back to the death of the arab, because Camus sees it as unimportant. Camus had a very nihilistic point of view when he wrote about Meursault's relationship with his mother and how he handled her death, during his own mothers funeral he was complaining that it was too bright, showed no grief for his late mother and then smoked a cigarette; then later that night he went to a comical movie and spent the night with a girl. Nihilist reject the concept of morals and from mersualts monologue, most would say that he is disconnected with his morals; that he should be broken over the death of his mother. But Camus believed that one should not love their mother simply because of the