The Stranger
Facts
• Original title: L’Étranger= the stranger/the foreigner/the outsider
• Psychologists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the
University of British Columbia published a report in 2009 showing
that reading absurdist tales improved test subjects' ability to find
patterns. Their findings summarized that when people have to work
to find consistency and meaning in a fragmented story, it increases
“the cognitive mechanisms responsible for implicitly learning
statistical regularities.”
• Jacobs, Tom. “This Is Your Brain on Kafka.” Pacific Standard. 16 September
2009.
• Time: 20th century, before 1942
• Place: Algiers, Algeria
Characters
• Meursault: the protagonist and narrator; a French citizen living in
Algeria; lacks emotion, empathy, and remorse; always brutally honest
• Meursault’s mother: lives in a nursing home; shared Meursault’s
indifference toward life
• Raymond Sintès: Meursault’s neighbor and friend, abusive towards
his mistress, a character foil for Meursault
• Marie Cardona: Meursault’s coworker, very pretty and full of life
Absurdist fiction
• The study of human behavior under circumstances (whether realistic or
fantastical) that appear to be purposeless and philosophically absurd
• Focuses on the experiences of characters in situations where they cannot
find any inherent purpose in life, most often represented by ultimately
meaningless actions and events that call into question the certainty of
existential concepts such as truth or value
• Often includes satire, dark humor, or a lack of faith in reason
• Characters and their actions are not judged, and the moral of the story is
not explicit.
• A traditional plot structure is often lacking.
Philosophy
• Absurdism: The efforts of humanity to find inherent meaning will
ultimately fail (and hence are absurd) because the sheer amount of
information as well as the vast realm of the unknown make total certainty
impossible.
• Three possible solutions:
• Suicide: Attempting to escape one’s own existence is even more absurd than existence.
• Religion: a solution in which one believes in the existence of a reality that is beyond the
Absurd, and, as such, has meaning. This is pointless, since it is unreal.
• Acceptance of the Absurd: a solution in which one accepts the Absurd and continues to live in
spite of it.
• Existentialism: One achieves happiness by creating one’s own meaning in
life.
• Nihilism: There never is and never can be any meaning in life.
Albert Camus
• 1913: born in Algeria to French parents
• 1914: His father was killed in World War I.
• Worked as a journalist writing anti-colonialist and
anti-German articles in Paris during World War II
• A major contributor to the theories of absurdism and existentialism.
His theories were inspired by the horrors he and others witnessed in
Paris and Europe during World War II.
• 1942: published The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger
• 1957: received the Nobel Prize for Literature for his generally
"important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness
illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times.“
• 1960: died in an automobile accident
• "I summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark I admit
was highly paradoxical: 'In our society any man who does not weep at
his mother's funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.' I only
meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not
play the game.” 1955