Fiction has recently been failing at even slightly grabbing my attention. The vast majority of my reading has been centered around essays and longer forms of nonfiction, mostly philosophy and politics. For example, Peter Kroptkin’s “The Conquest of Bread,” which has been quite an enjoyable read, and I should have a post about it once I have finished it. However, even though my nonfiction reading has been going well, my fiction reading has been a poem here and there (Mary Oliver and Bukowski) or perhaps a novel that I DNF (my sincerest apologies to “Flowers for Algernon”). I will admit that originally, my interest in “The Stranger” by Albert Camus was quite superficial. My mom had recently started reading “East of Eden” by John Steinbeck and was absolutely devouring it (it’s now her favorite novel). I was quite jealous and wanted something to talk about with her, as she does not care about the opinions of Schopenhauer in regards to suicide or why the tenets of anarcho-communism from “The Conquest of Bread” have changed my outlook on capitalism’s purposeful inefficiency in order to keep workers poor. I imagine very few people give a shit about either of the two things listed, so I needed something to connect with her; fiction was my key.
I read “The Stranger,” and this short novella of only one hundred twenty pages took me four days to complete. It was not from a lack of motivation. It was from a place of admiration, and that is self-evident through my “additions” to the work through barely legible annotations and my own sloppy introduction on the title page. So, I suppose this post will serve as a more formal way for me to introduce this wonderful work than the scrawled mess on my copy.
“The Stranger” opens with perhaps my favorite opening of all time. “Maman died today. Or yesterday, maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.” That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.” Here, we are introduced to the main character and our POV, Monsieur Meursault. As shown here, our narrator has a complete emotional detachment from life. He is unsure of when his own mom died. It is viewed as unimportant. However, it is important to mention that this novella is not actually a pessimistic one, and it would be quite a shame if anyone left the story with a more pessimistic view of the world.
Anyway, the novel follows Meursault as he drifts through life, offering objective physical sensations rather than any sort of emotion. Eventually, Meursault is prosecuted for a murder by the French (Algiers) court, and his subsequent trial and ruling offer the reader a look into his worldview, which at first feels cold and shallow. However, by the end of the novel, the layers of Meursault are peeled back and reveal a truly liberating idea behind the world: absurdism.
I suppose a bit of context would be useful here. Albert Camus, the author of “The Stranger,” is considered the pioneer of absurdism, which is the bastard child of existentialism and nihilism. Existentialism is simply the idea that life is inherently meaningless, but we can create our own meaning through whatever means. Absurdism rejects that we should create our own meaning and instead embrace the meaninglessness rather than falling into despair and depression like nihilism leads to. Camus thought that the pursuit of meaning in existentialism ultimately leads to conflict in life, which can put us into despair. For example, if the meaning of life for someone is to become rich and they are on their deathbed poor and fought for wealth, which they never achieved, Then, they will die in utter dissatisfaction since their lives didn’t achieve anything by their metric of meaning.
Absurdism offers an unconventional solution to this problem, and “The Stranger” serves as a fictionalized version for Camus to share his ideology. In “The Stranger,” Meursault states that all lives are inherently equal, as no one has more meaning than anyone else. Camus also touches on religion. A religious person dedicates their entire life to a deity that they cannot know for certain about the deity’s existence, so another conflict of meaning occurs. This religious person spends their life in service, which cannot guarantee the afterlife that they seek. Camus denies the existence, or at least the priority, of a god and states that our life now is in heaven. We should not live life for an afterlife or pursue meaning. We should experience the life we have and treat it as the opportunity that it is. Instead of harping on our pasts or irrational expectations of society, we should live life and take the hand we’re dealt, making the most of it instead of attempting to discover a meaning that doesn’t exist; this is the central idea around “The Stranger.” We should embrace the irrationality of life and stop trying to find meaning. It will make you much happier.
I felt renewed after reading this. It is no doubt one of my favorite pieces of fiction of all time, alongside Orwell’s “1984” and Chopin’s “The Awakening.” I hope that my fan-girlish introduction encourages you to go out and read it. It would only take you a day or two unless you find yourself obsessively annotating every page, as I did. I suppose the simplest way to describe my new favorite of fiction and philosophy is through a quote from Camus himself. “You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”