The Stranger by Albert Camus

The Stranger by Albert Camus

When The Stranger appeared in English in 1946 , readers could only look back with anger at nearly two decades of depression and war-and before that more war and more poverty and more repression , slavery , sweat shops , disease , madness , and early death . History seemed to be nothing less than a record of man 's immense foolishness , and since up until then knowing it seemed only to make matters worse , the lesson was clear Ignore it . And as for the future , it was pretty clear to anyone that the

less you bothered with it , the less you tempted fate . The less you tried to change things , it seemed , the better off you were . The idea was to take life a day at a time and live it without asking too much of it . The book 's antihero , Meursault , has freed himself of the obligation to care about others , to feel anything , to do more than sustain himself in a series of small pleasures . He has no large appetites , makes no large demands on others , asks nothing but to be left alone . Modernism has been defined as neither a continuation of the past nor a rebellion against it but rather an attitude of of Meursault 's personality . He lives blissfully unaware of the past and completely unconcerned about the future

Mother died today . Or maybe it was yesterday , I don 't know . I received a telegram from the rest home : mother deceased . burial tomorrow . very truly yours . It doesn 't say anything . Maybe it was yesterday (1 . Not exactly the normal reaction of a son to the news of his mother 's death What kind of person responds in this matter-of-fact way ? Are we not at first put off by such casualness ? Is not this Meursault a stranger to our normal feelings and expectations ? We sense a distance . Not that he seeks to scandalize or offend . Far from it . He is rather quite unassuming , almost shy . He wants neither to offend nor to be hated . When asking his boss for two days off to attend his mother 's funeral , for example , he feels that he ought not to have said that to him . Or , when sensing the reproach of the director of the rest home , he begins to explain himself

In short , we are disoriented , perhaps even slightly offended , by our encounter with a being who shows no sign of sharing normal human feelings . Nor does he attest to any normal aspirations . Slowly we are familiarized with his world , even led to see our own world through his eyes . Stripped of our normal conceptual lenses ' we see that world increasingly as arbitrary , capricious , pretentious , even hypocritical By the time of the trial we may even find ourselves tempted , if not actually inclined , to side with Meursault against the prosecutor and jurists who inhabit the world that was ours at the beginning of the novel . However short-lived that experiential voyage may prove to be , the stylistic accomplishment is...