The Stranger by Albert Camus

The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942, 144 pages, translated by Stewart Gilbert)

Why is The Stranger Important

Camus and the Japanese Novel

I recently posted on a short story by Albert Camus, "The Guest".    I am slightly embarrassed to admit that this story was my first Camus.     I knew Camus was a super influential figure and after reading "The Guest" I decided to read both of his two most famous novels, The Stranger and The Plague.


Albert Camus (1913 to 1960-Algiers) is French as a result of colonial conquest.  He won the Nobel Prize in 1957 and died three years later in a car accident.  Much of his work and life was fighting what he saw as the wretched rule of the French in Algeria.    He is considered a core Existential novelist but he totally repudiated this label.  You can learn more about him here.  


The plot of The Stranger is pretty simple and easy to follow.   It is set in Algeria in the 1940s.   A young French-Algerian man is drifting through life.   He seems to have no strong values, no real roots in society or among people, no goals and strong loves or hates.    He has a mother who dies.   He goes to her funeral (he supported her the best he could on his wage-he works as an office clerk) but he shows no outward remorse or sadness at her death.   He does not cry or to  seem to feel much of anything.  He has a girl friend that he likes having sex with but does not care much about.   it is not that he is uncaring to her, he just does not have it within him to care.   


One day he gets into a petty dispute with a local pimp and for the pettiest of reasons shots and kills a man, described as "An Arab".   (I guess the idea is that that is different legally from killing a French person.)    


He is placed in prison and after a few months his trial begins.   He does not seem to find prison all that bad perhaps as he did not find life all that good anyway.   The trial is a crazy farce with most of the time being spent talking about the fact he did  not show remorse at all when his mother died.   There is a great deal made over the fact that right after the funeral he went to a comedy movie.   (This does sound like the fuss made world wide in the media over the reaction of a woman accused of murdering her child after the funeral of the child.)    His attorney is a complete idiot.


Why is The Stranger an enduring classic still on college reading lists world wide?     Partially it may be it echos the emotional attitudes often found in intellectual/bookish people in their late teens and twenties when they sense there are no fixed values and react against their old belief structures by saying then all life must be absurd and meaningless.   In part, The Stranger is about finding a way to live in a world where you must decide for yourself what is right or wrong-when the old Gods have been destroyed.


The Stranger is a very influential book in Japanese literature.   It is not hard to see why.   One of the dominant themes of Post WWII Japanese literature is finding a way to live ethically while achieving maximum self-actualization in a world in which all of the creeds that held sway in your culture for 1000+ years have been shattered and exposed as baseless lies.   This is not ultimately a negative theme at all-it is about freedom.


I was also pleased to note that The Stranger is part of Clifton Fadiman's  Life Time Reading Plan, along with The Plague, which I plan to read very soon.


I was given three Camus titles recently by a patron of my blog from New Delhi to whom I am very grateful.


What is your experience with Camus?




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