This article explores the essence of human existence and life through Albert Camus’s philosophy of the absurd and his masterpiece The Stranger, illuminating his literary world.
Albert Camus and His Philosophy of the Absurd
Few people are unfamiliar with the name Albert Camus. It is also widely known that his works are grounded in ‘absurdity’ and ‘rebellion’. The ideological background of Camus’s literature can be seen in his essays, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel. While it is difficult to summarize ‘absurdity’ and ‘rebellion’ in a few words, their fundamental nature can be clearly stated. Camus views human existence in the world as contradictory. Human existence in the world, in other words, is life itself. So, what are the two fundamental elements constituting this contradiction in life?
We might call them ‘despair over death and the joy of life,’ or ‘loneliness and love,’ or even ‘evil’ and ‘good.’ However, the lucid recognition of ‘contradictory life’ is not only the fundamental idea Camus developed in The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel, but also a basic truth he gained from his experience (the testimony of this experience being Betwixt and Between), which he consistently and faithfully upheld from beginning to end. It is significant that his first work bore the contradictory title *Betwixt and Between*, and his final work similarly carried the contradictory title *Exile and the Kingdom*.
According to Camus, human beings, as rational beings, desire to understand the meaning of the world because they possess a desire for reason. Yet the world has no meaning that humans can comprehend. The two opposing forces—humanity’s ‘desire for reason’ and the world’s ‘irrationality’—and the contradiction arising from this paradox: this is Camus’s absurdity, humanity’s inescapable fate, the human condition.
Yet not everyone feels it. Those whose consciousness is asleep do not perceive it. They merely turn the wheel of daily life mechanically, following habit, never questioning whether life has meaning. Such sleepiness precludes true consciousness; only when consciousness fully awakens and clearly recognizes the absurd can a human truly be human. Therefore, according to Camus, the recognition of absurdity is itself human dignity. And the attitude of affirming life by facing this absurdity, accepting it as it is without trying to resolve the contradiction—that is ‘rebellion’.
The Stranger unfolds against the backdrop of Algeria. Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria, in 1913. He likely cherished Algeria’s beaches and sun. His father was a laborer, and his mother was of Spanish descent. Coming from a poor family, he worked his way through school until graduating from the National University of Algiers. His work at a local newspaper during this time led to him frequently working as a journalist afterward.
He joined the Communist Party in 1934 but left the following year. Fascinated by theater, he organized a troupe called ‘Théâtre du Travail,’ adapting and staging several plays. Notably, in their production of The Brothers Karamazov, he played the role of ‘Ivan.’ In 1938, he wrote a critical article in the Algerian Republican newspaper about Sartre’s Nausea, stating that “the ugly side of humanity was emphasized.” This reveals one facet of Camus’s humanity.
In 1940, as World War II began, he completed The Stranger and the first part of The Myth of Sisyphus, publishing them two years later. The fact that the controversial The Stranger was published during the chaotic early days of World War II may hold special significance. From 1942, he became the Paris editor of the anti-German resistance journal Combat, leading the resistance movement, and a year later became its editor-in-chief. It was during this time that he first began associating with Sartre. However, after publishing his essay The Rebel in 1951, Sartre harshly criticized it in The Modern Times, where he was editor-in-chief. Camus responded by submitting an “Open Letter to the Editor of The Modern Times” to the same magazine, severing ties with Sartre. In 1956, he published The Fall and received the Nobel Prize in Literature the following year.
Through approximately twenty years of literary work, Camus earned the Nobel Prize in Literature and gained readers worldwide. The Stranger is his most representative work and the most widely read of his writings. As mentioned earlier, The Stranger demonstrates the inevitable outcome where a slumbering consciousness collides with the futile contradiction of absurdity. Let us examine how this manifests in The Stranger.
Man in Absurdity: Camus’s The Stranger
The protagonist, Meursault, goes swimming, has sex with a woman, watches a comedy film, and laughs the day after his mother dies. He kills an Arab “because of the sun.” The night before his execution, he declares, “I was happy in the past, and I am happy now,” and wishes for a large crowd to gather around the guillotine “to watch his execution with shouts of hatred.”
Meursault, a mere clerk living in Algiers, leads a very mundane life. Yet within it unfolds a world of futility.
“It was a gloomy Sunday, just like any other. Mother had already been buried. I had to go back to work. In the end, nothing had changed.”
This shocking statement—that nothing changed even after his mother’s death—leads Meursault to have an affair with a typist named Marie the very next day. He meets a thug named Raymond and ends up going to the beach with him by chance. Then, in a dispute with Raymond, he shoots and kills an Arab man in the blazing sun.
When he stands trial, the lawyer, judge, and prosecutor all focus on his behavior at his mother’s funeral. The fact that he didn’t shed tears and fell asleep that day was significant to others. But Meursault was merely tired and dozed off at his mother’s funeral; it didn’t mean he didn’t love her. “Without preamble, he [the examining magistrate] asked if he had loved his mother. ‘Yes, I loved her like everyone else,’ he answered.” Meursault sees no connection between loving his mother and either dozing off at her funeral or having an affair with a woman. And he thinks it has even less to do with killing the Arab. Thus, Meursault is sentenced to death. Because he couldn’t make a good defense.
He simply couldn’t care less about his own affairs. Events pass him by as if they weren’t his own. He remains unaware of his crime, staged by chance. Consequently, he doesn’t agonize over it; rather, he is bewildered by the death sentence. Because, apart from the pleasure of swimming at the beach, the softness of an Algerian afternoon, and physical love, nothing in this world truly concerns him; it is all truly ‘foreign’. Yet, in the eyes of others, his actions are sinful and perceived as connected to it. In other words, he is a cold-hearted man who did not love his mother, a delinquent who mixed with gangs, and a deviant involved in obscene acts who killed someone. Thus, he receives the death sentence.
From this moment, he feels an infinite attachment to life, but the world is already indifferent to him. Because of this indifference the world first showed him, he was opening his heart for the first time to the world’s affectionate indifference. He says, “I was happy, and I am still happy, feeling that the world is no different from me, that it is like a brother.” Thus, the novel ends with him declaring, “Now, to feel that everything is accomplished and that I am not alone, my only remaining wish is that on the day of my execution, many spectators greet me with shouts of hatred.”
Just as he wrote The Rebel as an interpretation of The Plague, Camus wrote The Myth of Sisyphus a few months later as an interpretation of The Stranger. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he described this novel depicting boredom and nihilism as: “Waking up, the tram, four hours in the office or factory, lunch, four hours of labor, dinner, sleep, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday—always the same rhythm.” Within the unchanging repetition of identical daily life, the human spirit becomes mechanized and existence grows monotonous. For humans, hope and illusion vanish, leaving only physical reality and fleeting pleasures.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus states, “In a world suddenly stripped of illusion and light, man feels himself an ‘outsider’. There is no salvation from this exile, for he has no memory of a lost homeland, nor hope for a promised land.” Therefore, the ‘stranger’ refers to humanity in relation to the world.
Meursault’s actions—such as his affair with Marie the day after his mother’s funeral, or the killing of an Arab with whom he had no personal connection—are incomprehensible to others. This is well captured by the following passage from The Myth of Sisyphus: “A man is making a phone call on the other side of the window. Of course, we cannot hear his words. But we can see his meaningless gestures. The person on this side wonders why he is making those gestures.“ At this moment, the actions of the person behind the window are absurd. To borrow Sartre’s expression, ”It is because he belongs to a broken line. If he opens the door and puts his ear to the receiver, the line is connected, and human activity acquires meaning.”
Camus has inserted a glass window between the character and the reader. The person behind the window appears impotent. That window lets everything pass through, yet there is one thing it cannot transmit: the meaning inherent in the gesture. This breakdown in meaning creates a rupture in consciousness between Meursault and others.
This rupture in consciousness signifies the destruction of order within human society. Therefore, the theme Camus addresses in The Stranger is the deepest insight into and the most scathing indictment of this absurdity. To borrow Sartre’s words, The Stranger is “a dry and clean work, seemingly disordered yet well-constructed, and all too human.”
At the time of its publication, the world, including France, was in a period of social and mental turmoil due to World War II. Simultaneously, human values had shifted through the two wars. Countless lives were lost as if human life were not particularly precious. Upon its release, the work was hailed as a literary triumph of existentialism. Though Camus was not an existentialist, he belonged to that tendency.
The wave of existentialist works that swept the world around World War II was largely due to Camus’s The Stranger and Sartre’s series of philosophical theories. Furthermore, his receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 was no coincidence. His literary merit in presenting and establishing new values upon a chaotic and disordered spiritual landscape was recognized. His writerly spirit, grounded in sincerity to oneself and human dignity, striving to realize social justice, led him to be called not merely a great French writer, but a sincere writer.
After World War II ended in 1945, amidst the desolate ruins, Camus discerned the crisis of the human spirit. The ideas of ‘absurdity’ and ‘rebellion’ he proposed to overcome it possessed a power surpassing medieval religion, deeply moving and influencing readers. What was often dismissed as vulgar nihilism in some countries stemmed from a failure to properly understand Camus. At least until the emergence of the Nouveau Roman as a dominant literary trend in the 1950s, Camus’s literature wielded a powerful influence.
Camus’s tragic death in 1960 prevented us from witnessing another The Stranger. Yet his 1942 The Stranger will never lose its significance—not only for its literary historical importance around World War II, but also for representing and dominating the spirit of an entire generation.
