The Stranger

Summary

The Stranger is a short novel in two parts narrated by Meursault, a young shipping clerk in Algiers in French Algeria, who reports what he sees and feels in plain, flat sentences and seldom explains himself. Part One, in six chapters, covers about eighteen days. Meursault receives a telegram that his mother has died at the old people's home in Marengo, some fifty miles from Algiers. He keeps the night vigil beside her closed coffin, drinks coffee with milk, smokes, and dozes; at the funeral the next day he walks behind the hearse in blinding heat with Thomas Pérez, an old man who had been his mother's companion. He does not weep and does not wish to see her face. The following day he goes swimming, meets Marie Cardona, a former typist from his office, and takes her to a comedy film. He comes to know his neighbors: old Salamano, who beats and curses his mangy dog and grieves when it runs away, and Raymond Sintès, a man of doubtful reputation who asks Meursault to write a letter luring back a mistress he means to punish. Raymond beats her, and Meursault agrees to testify for him with the police. Meursault declines a post in Paris offered by his employer and tells Marie that he will marry her if she likes, though he does not think he loves her. On a Sunday at the beach cottage of Raymond's friend Masson, the three men fight two Arab men, one of them the woman's brother, and Raymond is cut with a knife. Later Meursault walks back alone toward a spring, holding Raymond's revolver. Dazed by the sun, he sees the Arab's knife flash and fires, then fires four more times into the motionless body. Part Two, in five chapters, covers nearly a year in prison. The examining magistrate waves a crucifix and is baffled by Meursault's lack of belief and remorse. Meursault adjusts to prison, rereads a newspaper story about a man murdered by his own mother and sister, and receives a visit from Marie. At the trial in Algiers the prosecutor dwells less on the killing than on Meursault's conduct at the funeral, and the director of the home, the caretaker, Pérez, Marie, Raymond, Salamano and the café owner Céleste testify. He is condemned to be beheaded in a public square. In his cell he refuses the chaplain three times; when the priest insists, he seizes him by the collar and pours out his conviction that nothing matters but this life and its certain end. Afterward he feels at peace and wishes only for a crowd of onlookers at his execution. Gallimard published the novel in Paris in 1942, during the German occupation. Stuart Gilbert's translation appeared in 1946 and Matthew Ward's in 1988. The library holds no text; the novel remains under copyright.

Top Lessons

• Judged for what he did not feel

  Meursault's trial is ostensibly about a killing, but the prosecutor builds his case on the vigil, the coffee, the cigarette, the swim and the comic film. Camus asks how far a society judges a person by whether he shows the expected feelings.

• The absurd

  In The Myth of Sisyphus, published the same year, Camus described the absurd as the clash between the human longing for meaning and a silent universe. Meursault lives inside that condition without naming it, until the chaplain's visit forces him to put it into words.

• Honesty without kindness

  Meursault refuses to say what he does not feel: he will not claim to love Marie, to regret his act more than he does, or to believe in God. Camus later wrote that his hero is condemned because he will not lie. Yet the same honesty coexists with indifference to Raymond's mistress and to the man he kills.

• Faith offered and refused

  Both the magistrate and the chaplain press the claims of Christian faith on Meursault, the one in anger, the other in pity. His refusal is the book's climax, and Camus lets each side speak; the chaplain's sincerity and his offer of prayer are as real as Meursault's rejection.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The novel opens in an old people's home and turns on the absence of conventional mourning, which the trial treats as evidence of a criminal nature. Some later readers have offered retrospective psychiatric readings of Meursault's flat affect and detachment; these are interpretive and sit uneasily with Camus's own account of a man who simply refuses to lie about his feelings. The killing on the beach is narrated as a near-dissociative experience of heat, light and sweat, and the prison chapters describe adaptation to confinement and the contemplation of execution.

• Part One, Chapter 1

  The vigil among the elderly residents of the home at Marengo and the funeral procession, in which Pérez collapses in the heat.

• Part One, Chapter 6

  The sun, glare and sweat that overwhelm Meursault as he approaches the spring and fires the revolver.

• Part Two, Chapter 5

  Meursault's thoughts on the guillotine, the chances of a successful appeal and the dawn on which the condemned are taken.