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The Stranger is one of the most enigmatic books on the modern classics bookshelf. While reading it, it is easy to believe that it is the result of a thought in the artist’s head; its strangeness resembles the strangeness of a thought taken very far. But it is not entirely clear what that thought is, and by the end, you are left with the feeling that you have read something quite a bit deeper than an idea taken to a distant conclusion. There is a hint of Borges, but the overall effect is rather to point to the strangeness of the universe rather than to the strangeness of mind or our ideas about the universe.

The simplest way to describe the book would be to say that it is the story of a man who does not care very much about anything. It begins thus:

Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure. The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday.

This unemotive style continues.  When he is in the midst of the funeral arrangements for his mother:

When I went out, the sun was up and the sky mottled red above the hills between Marengo and the sea. A morning breeze was blowing and it had a pleasant salty tang. There was the promise of a very fine day. I hadn’t been in the country for ages, and I caught myself thinking what an agreeable walk I could have had, if it hadn’t been for Mother. (14)

And with the woman who wants him to marry her, after sleeping with her:

She was wearing one of my pajama suits, and had the sleeves rolled up. When she laughed I wanted her again. A moment later she asked me if I loved her. I said that sort of question had no meaning, really; but I supposed I didn’t. She looked sad for a bit, but when we were getting our lunch ready she brightened up and started laughing, and when she laughs I always want to kiss her. (44)

Again, it is very tempting to find some idea behind this, to say, “A-ha, now I get it, he’s describing the modern economic cog-man, he’s decrying the ‘dying of the light’ and so forth.” But nothing so programmatic can be discerned. In fact, there is reason enough to believe that Camus feels great sympathy for his protagonist, despite the fact that he goes on to callously murder a man, and is put on trial, where his utter lack of compunction or emotional response (including to his mother’s death) makes his case somewhat famous. He is convicted – he confessed without blinking to the murder – and sentenced to death.

Camus’s style is apt – even amazingly apt – for the story, and is a nearly perfect example of straight factual narrative. Hemingway became famous for this style, but he doesn’t really ever use it; the only other person who could have written such a story from the first-person perspective without sacrificing any of his natural style would probably be Andre Gide. If you want lean narrative and complete control of detail – there are almost no abstact nouns or similes, this is pure “show don’t tell” writing – Camus and Gide are the writers you study (Gide is especially famous for the near-absence of metaphors in his writing, as he intended always to describe things with the words most literally appropriate). Both merit the encomium Cicero gave to the style of Caesar: “naked, with perfect posture, and beautiful [nudi, recti, ac venusti], like an athlete stripped for the contest.” In particular I will cite the example of the old man Salamano and his dog as tour-de-force artistic treatment. The book is also astonishingly brief: probably not more than 30,000 words.

Now this bare style does not mean that Camus’s stranger-protagonist Meursault has nothing whatever that interests him; in fact, what he seems to be interested in are the things which make the narrative style so compelling, i.e. the absolute facts of life: how hot it was, where the wind was blowing from, whether a woman’s clothes reveal the shape of her breasts or not. What does not concern him is everything else: love, truth, justice, grief, anger, friendship, guilt, innocence, God, passion, the Devil. This simple fact – that the source of the artistic strength of the narrative is precisely the thing which makes Meursault an “inhuman monster,” as the prosecutor says of him – is enough to give a thoughtful reader pause.

It goes further, as the book’s end makes it clear enough that all of us are convicted and sentenced to death, by the universe itself, whether we are “inhuman monsters” or not. Concepts like morality and justice – and God, insofar as he is merely the umpire of man’s moral behavior – have nothing to do with this fundamental pattern, and all of our thoughts of the afterworld appear as nothing but a way to blur the outline of the great and unendurable foreground fact of our lives.

Seen in this light, the protagonist’s indifference to morality and justice could be quite natural – could be the attitude of the universe itself, and absence of concern for the emotions a kind of redefinition of Dante’s desire, an aligning with the same force that moves the sun and the other stars – “a benign indifference,” Camus calls it. The internal content here varies somewhat by theology, but the family resemblance to the entire world of contemplative life is clear. All contemplation (indeed all happy human life) must have in it some form of indifference to suffering and emotion.

The endlessly fascinating thing about Camus is his capacity to come so close to what some would call nihilism – again, this book contains no indication that anything we can think about the universe has any importance at all – without ever quite getting there. Indeed the overall feel of the book borders on religious – as often with those who reject most of what is called religion. Because they have rejected prejudicial certainties, they are open to an experience of the universe – which Camus seems to be describing at the end – and what is more, without those certainties they are forced to live instead – in mystery. Certainty is the enemy of all faith. “Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.”

The Stranger should either be read in full or not at all – the effect of reading the whole is entirely different from reading 95% of it. Until the last three pages, Meursault has no strong motives at all – everything happens to him, and he is affected only by surfaces. But the book ends with an impassioned paroxysm and tirade against the priest who had come to confess him. It is an astonishing piece of writing. It is filled with an impassioned commitment to life which seems to have nothing whatever to do with his earlier conduct, in which he threw away the life of another man as well as his own.

There is much in the tirade that one can object to. He claims that he had lived his own life and that as a result he had something to hold onto – he was proud of his life. This may well be true, although the intense passion he displays at the end has no obvious connection with his utterly passive prior conduct. The ending of the book, in other words, might have been the life-ending given to an entirely different character in an entirely different book. Nevertheless, it is pleasant to think that perhaps any man – even the one we judge most ruthlessly – can perhaps feel this way about his existence, looking back on it. Artistically the ending certainly is a success – in fact it redeems the whole, and sends the reader off with a grand fortissimo.

Intellectually, the tirade takes for granted the idea (myth) that we are “individuals,” when (I would say that) nothing is clearer than the fact that the boundaries between individuals are highly fluid. He asks how another man’s death (or life, really) can make any difference to him. Yet the prime human experience is that nothing makes more of a difference than the lives and deaths of others. Here is another perspective on the same question, which I believe is utterly true, from Wendell Berry: “I began to understand that whenever death happened, it happened to me. That is knowledge that takes a long time to wear in.” In Meursault’s instance the “cleansing” rage of this last moment is in fact brought on by another man, with his theological certitude. In fact we are constantly brought to anger, laughter, tears, yawns, arousal, and fear by the anger, laughter, tears, yawns, arousal, and fear of the people around us. And for most of this this interaction constitutes one of the great facts of experience. What is more, Meursault orders others not to judge the way he has spent his own life – the murderer who cared not a fig for his mother’s death – but he feels quite certain his own life was much better than the priest’s, “who lived like a corpse.”

Of course there is a reason for this contempt, as it is the artistic presentation of the rejection of a social category like morality as the ultimate truth of the universe, with a consequent refusal to be caught in remorse. This is noble and looks to the higher, mystical aspect of our nature. Though Meursault and the priest are at odds in the narrative – and I’m sure Camus thought of it that way himself – like a line of longitude it tends toward convergence with its antipus. The Christian Dostoevsky made a murderer and a whore the heroes of his most finished work.

But enough talk of this ending. Not only for its superior artistry, but as a relic of a man’s passion for life and fidelity to his own experience the entire passage has a sanctity that cannot be denied, and I supply it in full.

Then, I don’t know how it was, but something seemed to break inside me, and I started yelling at the top of my voice. I hurled insults at him, I told him not to waste his rotten prayers on me; it was better to burn than to disappear. I’d taken him by the neckband of his cassock, and, in a sort of ecstasy of joy and rage, I poured out on him all the thoughts that had been simmering in my brain. He seemed so cocksure, you see. And yet none of his certainties was worth one strand of a woman’s hair. Living as he did, like a corpse, he couldn’t even be sure of being alive. It might look as if my hands were empty. Actually, I was sure of myself, sure about everything, far surer than he; sure of my present life and of the death that was coming. That, no doubt, was all I had; but at least that certainty was something I could get my teeth into – just as it had got its teeth into me. I’d been right, I was still right, I was always right. I’d passed my life in a certain way, and I might have passed it in a different way, if I’d felt like it. I’d acted thus, and I hadn’t acted otherwise; I hadn’t done x, whereas I had done y or z. And what did that mean? That, all the time, I’d been waiting for this present moment, for that dawn, tomorrow’s or another day’s, which was to justify me. Nothing, nothing had the least importance, and I knew quite well why. He, too, knew why. From the dark horizon of my future a sort of slow, persistent breeze had been blowing toward me, all my life long, from the years that were to come. And on its way that breeze had leveled out all the ideas that people had tried to foist on me in the equally unreal years I then was living through. What difference could they make to me, the deaths of others, or a mother’s love, or his God; or the way a man decides to live, the fate he thinks he chooses, since one and the same fate was bound to “choose” not only me but thousands of millions of privileged people who, like him, called themselves my brothers. Surely, surely he must see that? Every man alive was privileged; there was only one class of men, the privileged class. All alike would be condemned to die one day; his turn, too, would come like the others’. And what difference could it make if, after being charged with murder, he was executed because he didn’t weep at his mother’s funeral, since it all came to the same thing in the end? The same thing for Salamano’s wife and for Salamano’s dog. That little robot woman was as “guilty” as the girl from Paris who had married Masson, or as Marie, who wanted me to marry her. What did it matter if Raymond was as much my pal as Celeste, who was a far worthier man? What did it matter if at this very moment Marie was kissing a new boy friend? As a condemned man himself, couldn’t he grasp what I meant by the dark wind blowing from my future? …
I had been shouting so much that I’d lost my breath, and just then the jailers rushed in and started trying to release the chaplain from my grip. One of them made as if to strike me. The chaplain quietened them down, then gazed at me for a moment without speaking. I could see tears in his eyes. Then he turned and left the cell.
Once he’d gone, I felt calm again. But all this excitement had exhausted me and I dropped heavily on to my sleeping plank. I must have had a longish sleep, for, when I woke, the stars were shining down on my face. Sounds of the countryside came faintly in, and the cool night air, veined with smells of earth and salt, fanned my cheeks. The marvelous peace of the sleepbound summer night flooded through me like a tide. Then, just on the edge of daybreak, I heard a steamer’s siren. People were starting on a voyage to a world which had ceased to concern me forever. Almost for the first time in many months I thought of my mother. And now, it seemed to me, I understood why at her life’s end she had taken on a “fiance”; why she’d played at making a fresh start. There, too, in that Home where lives were flickering out, the dusk came as a mournful solace. With death so near, Mother must have felt like someone on the brink of freedom, ready to start life all over again. No one, no one in the world had any right to weep for her. And I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.