Overview
Camus's 1942 novel opens with one of the most famous first lines in twentieth-century fiction: 'Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I can't be sure.' The narrator Meursault, a French Algerian, drifts through a killing and its aftermath without the emotional responses society expects of him.
Camus wrote The Stranger (L'Etranger in the original French) in occupied France, drawing on his own upbringing in French Algeria. Published in 1942, the same year as The Myth of Sisyphus, it is the novelistic companion to that essay. The 1988 Matthew Ward English translation is generally preferred over the earlier Stuart Gilbert version, which softens Meursault's voice.
Key Ideas
The absurd dramatised
Meursault is Camus's philosophy walking around — a man who refuses to perform the feelings he does not have.
Estranged narration
The novel's famous flatness of tone enacts Meursault's estrangement from the scripts the society around him assumes.
The second half trial
Meursault is convicted less for the murder itself than for his refusal to weep at his mother's funeral — the novel's central critique of social judgement.
Light and heat
Camus uses the physical sensations of the Algerian sun as a kind of non-verbal protagonist throughout the book.
The final paragraph
Meursault's final acceptance of the 'benign indifference of the universe' is one of the great philosophical climaxes in fiction.
Who should read this
Readers who want the foundational existentialist / absurdist novel at its most compressed. The book is short — under 200 pages — and can be read in an afternoon, though its implications last longer. Useful as a first serious encounter with twentieth-century European fiction.
Who might skip it
Skip if you want a likable protagonist — Meursault is deliberately estranged from conventional moral sympathy. Skip also if you are uncomfortable with the novel's colonial context; modern readings (particularly Kamel Daoud's The Meursault Investigation) complicate its treatment of Arab characters significantly.
The verdict
A novel whose first sentence and last paragraph alone are worth the read. Camus's flat, sunlit prose is the form of his philosophy, not a decoration. Read it alongside The Myth of Sisyphus and then Daoud's response to see three views of the same material across eighty years.
I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.
— Albert Camus, The Stranger
If you liked this
The Plague for Camus's longer novel. The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud for the postcolonial response.