The Stranger By Albert Camus Research Paper

Rumaanah Sharif

English 10, Block 4

The Stranger by Albert Camus Book Cards

Authorial/Contextual notes

Albert Camus was born in 1913, in French Colonial Algeria. He was born in the midst of World War I. When his father died in 1914, Camus’ family was left in extreme poverty. Despite the poverty he lived in, Camus was able to attend the University of Algiers, where The Stranger is based, by working odd jobs here and there. However, Camus contracted a severe attack of tuberculosis, he was then forced to drop out of school due to his illness. The poverty and illnesses Camus had experienced when he was younger influenced his writing significantly. After dropping out of college, Camus started working for an anti-colonialist newspaper where he

primarily wrote about the poverty in Algeria. Camus was well known for his theory of “the absurd” where he theorised that life had no rational meaning or value. Many people believed this because of Hitler’s Nazi regime and the devastation of the war. Many of them thought human existence had no purpose or meaning. Camus’s philosophy of the absurd implies that morality has no rational need or benefit, this greatly influenced the creation of the main character of The Stranger.
Major Characters
The main protagonist and narrator in this book is Meursault, he refuses to adhere to the accepted moral order of society and is emotionally indifferent to those closest to him. He is detached in a way from the rest of the world and his surroundings. He is shown as simply not caring about his mother's death and his girlfriend’s love towards him. This is because he does not make the distinction between good and bad in his mind before doing things such as: killing a man with no clear motive and writing letters to Raymond's mistress because he “didn't have a reason not to”. He does not put a value on the judgments and ideas that he carries out. He is unemotional at his mother's funeral and doesn't explicitly think much of it later on, when he first finds out he goes on to state:
“Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: ‘Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.’ That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.” (1 camus)
Not only does Meursault not know the actual date of his mother's death, he’s too passive and nonchalant to try to find out.
Another major character is Raymond, Raymond acts as a spark in the book’s plot. He, in a sense, ultimately caused Meursault’s downfall. Raymond is quite different from Meursault in the sense that he knows what he is doing is wrong, Raymond knows that it is wrong to abuse his mistress and to kill her brother, but on the other hand, Meursault has doesn't know the difference between good and bad in his own mind. When Raymond first came to Meursault asking him to write the letters to his mistress, Meursault didn't question it at all, this is what was going through his mind while Raymond was asking him:
"He asked if I thought she was cheating on him, and it seemed to me she was; if I thought she should be punished and what I would do in his place, and I said you can't ever be sure, but I understood his wanting to punish her.” (17 Camus)
It never occurred to Meursault that this was an uneasy situation and that he was possibly being used because of his passiveness. Ultimately Meursault agreed to Raymond's request but he showed his very first sign that he had some concept of morals:
"I got up. Raymond gave me a very firm handshake and said that men always understand each other. I left his room, closing the door behind me, and paused for a minute in the dark, on the landing. The house was quiet, and a breath of dark, dank air wafted up from deep in the stairwell. All I could hear was the blood pounding in my ears. I stood there, motionless." (18 Camus)
This slight pause from Meursault adds to the fact that he is not immoral but instead he doesn't have a full grasp of the concept in general.
Plot Paragraph
Meursault is a young man living in Algeria, he gets news that his mother had died and he is emotionless when he finds out and when he is at the funeral.

Meursault then runs into a neighbour named Raymond who convinces Meursault to write letters to his ex-mistress to lure her back to him. Meursault ends up killing Raymond’s mistress’s brother, The Arab, Meursault is then thrown in jail. The lawyer seems disgusted at the fact the Meursault shows no remorse toward his victim and sentences him to death by beheading. Then one day the Chaplain comes to visit Meursault to try to change his atheist views, Meursault becomes enraged and finally accepts that human existence holds no greater

meaning.
Thematic Statement
The novel, The Stranger, explores the theme of mortality and the verdict of death through the conflicting idea of the desire to live and the fear of dying. The books starts off with an announcement of death, Meursault shoots a man , and then Meursault is sentenced to death. Since death is common in this novel the reader is forced to confront the different views on this universal theme of death. Meursault overlooks his made up difference between execution and natural death, he must deal with the concept of hope. Hope only tortures him, because it creates the false illusion that he can change the fact of his death. When Meursault is in prison the chaplain comes to visit him in hopes of Meursault finding god within himself, instead of finding god he realises the revelation the book has been building his character up to:
“Then, I don’t know why, but something inside me snapped.

I started yelling at the top of my lungs, and I insulted him and told him not to waste his prayers on me. I grabbed him by the collar of his cassock. I was pouring out on him everything that was in my heart... He seemed so certain about everything, didn’t he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman’s head. He wasn’t even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man... But I was sure about me, about everything, surer than he could ever be, sure of my life and sure of the death I had waiting for me. Yes, that was all I had. But at least I had as much of a hold on it as it had on

me.”
After this revelation that you aren't really living until you accept the fact of your own death, Meursault is free. Meursault has escaped the binding of the society he was expected to conform to. This is when Camus theory of absurdity brings together the plot of the book and when it completes the character Meursault.
Scholarly Criticism
In Lewis Warsh’s The Stranger analysis (Warsh, Lewis. The Stranger. Barron's, 2004. eLibrary. Web. 13 Nov. 2016.) the theme of death and the theme of permanence are discussed as having the same connotation. Warsh also discusses that our lives are compared to the permanence of the universe and as soon as Meursault had accepted this, he had the burden of unknown morality and morality lifted from his shoulders. In the article it states:
“The natural forces do not have empathy for us or care. They are neither good nor evil; they are simply there, and they go on being there long after we are gone. To accept this philosophy is to live in a world without God. Meursault can accept this and lives with the sensations, both pleasurable and painful, of sun and wind, of caresses, of smells and sights. Yet his incapacity to look beyond the sensation of the moment leads him into a pattern of action that changes his relationship to all these sensations, and in prison he is deprived of all that has made his life enjoyable.” (Warsh)
This is explaining the outlook that Meursault may have had on life previously but he just had not explored what he thought he believed. I agree with the combined ideas of mortality and permanence that were throughout this novel, these ideas helped with the revelation that Meursault had at the end and why it took him so long to realise how he truly felt.