The Stranger
by Albert Camus
Summary
Meursault, a French Algerian clerk in Algiers, opens the novel with the flat announcement that his mother died today, or maybe yesterday, and attends her funeral without the grief anyone around him expects to see. He returns to his ordinary life almost immediately, begins a relationship with a woman named Marie, and gets drawn into the affairs of his neighbor Raymond, a man with a violent grudge against his own former mistress and her brother. On a blinding hot beach, provoked by the glare of the sun and the memory of an earlier confrontation, Meursault shoots and kills Raymond's unnamed Arab antagonist, then fires four more shots into the already dead body for reasons he can never fully explain, even to himself. The novel's second half follows his arrest, imprisonment, and trial, where the prosecutor spends far less time on the killing itself than on Meursault's failure to cry at his mother's funeral, treating his emotional indifference as proof of a monstrous character capable of anything. Despite testimony from friends who liked him, Meursault is sentenced to death by guillotine. Awaiting execution, he refuses the prison chaplain's offer of religious comfort, and in the novel's final pages arrives instead at a kind of peace, opening himself for the first time to what Camus calls the benign indifference of the universe and wishing only for a large, hostile crowd to greet his execution with cries of hate.
Camus writes in short, plain declarative sentences that refuse to explain Meursault's interior life the way a conventional novel would, so a reader is left, deliberately, in the same position as the courtroom, watching a man's actions without ever being handed the meaning behind them. It reads very quickly, a short novel finished in a sitting or two, and that speed is part of the unsettling effect, since there is no room in the prose for the moral commentary a reader keeps expecting and never gets.
Camus finished the manuscript by May 1941, and Gallimard published it in occupied Paris in 1942 in a first printing of 4,400 copies, without interference from wartime censors. Camus was in Algeria, ill with tuberculosis, when it appeared. Jean Paul Sartre's 1943 essay on the novel helped push it toward the wide readership it has kept ever since.
Historical Context & Significance
L'Etranger appeared in French from a Paris publisher and its author held French Algerian citizenship, which placed it outside the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction on every count that mattered, nationality, language, and country of publication; no English translation existed until Stuart Gilbert's in 1946. No prize marked its original 1942 publication.
Camus won the Nobel Prize in Literature fifteen years later, in 1957, and the Swedish Academy's citation praised him for his important literary production, which with clear sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times, honoring the full body of work behind Camus's name rather than singling out The Stranger itself. Le Monde later ranked the novel first on its 1999 list of the hundred books of the twentieth century, a recognition that arrived decades after the wartime printing that first brought Meursault into the world.