The Stranger Loss Of Innocence Essay

An analysis of a potentially innocent, middle-aged sociopath and how being alienated lead him to committing a murder in Albert Camus’ The Stranger.

Albert Camus presents The Stranger, a story where the line between innocence and guilt becomes almost unrecognizable. Meursault, a middle-aged man whose mother has recently passed away, gets put on trial for the murder of an Arab man because he became angered by the sun. While the reasoning behind the killing is frivolous and weak, it does not make him completely guilty.

Meursault “exemplifies a dangerous inauthenticity and isolation” (Schneider et al. 182) from the very beginning of the book. The detachment, from Maman’s death, illustrates to the reader that he is not normal. The main character’s

It seems as if Meursault never cared about what was happening to him because, to him, the stranger happened to be himself. Meursault’s way of life “shows that [he] does not understand that human existence is social” (Sagi, 22).

As an outcast, Meursault does not express much thought so people are quick to points fingers at him and claim him as guilty. /When Marie asks Meursault if he would marry any woman with whom he had a similar relationship with, he said yes. Ideally, Marie would have hoped he said no because she wants her love to be reciprocated. Meursault, on the other hand, could not care less because he does not see what is so special with marriage. He “faces the social world as a stranger, failing to share its values because he is honest with himself” (Sagi 90), that she wants, not because he is interested in marriage itself.

Social norms are a foreign concept to Meursault. For him to say, “... Much to my surprise, they all shook my hand-- as if that night during which we hadn’t exchanged as much as a single word had somehow brought us closer together” (Camus, 12) proves Meursault’s bewilderment on what society thinks people should