The Stranger
is not merely one of the most widely read novels of the 20th
century, but one of the books likely to outlive it. Written in 1946,
Camus's compelling and troubling tale of a disaffected, apparently
amoral young man has earned a durable popularity (and remains a staple
of U.S. high school literature courses) in part because it reveals so
vividly the anxieties of its time. Alienation, the fear of anonymity,
spiritual doubt--all could have been given a purely modern inflection
in the hands of a lesser talent than Camus, who won the Nobel Prize
in 1957 and was noted for his existentialist aesthetic. The remarkable
trick of The Stranger, however, is that it's not mired in period philosophy.
The
plot is simple. A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of
aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local
pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's
imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes
apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has
committed as it is his deficient character. The trial's proceedings
are absurd, a parsing of incidental trivialities--that Meursault,
for instance, seemed unmoved by his own mother's death and then
attended a comic movie the evening after her funeral are two
ostensibly damning facts--so that the eventual sentence the jury issues
is both ridiculous and inevitable.
Meursault
remains a cipher nearly to the story's end--dispassionate, clinical,
disengaged from his own emotions. "She wanted to know if I loved
her," he says of his girlfriend. "I answered the same way I had the
last time, that it didn't mean anything but that I probably didn't."
There's a latent ominousness in such observations, a sense that
devotion is nothing more than self-delusion. It's undoubtedly true
that Meursault exhibits an extreme of resignation; however, his
confrontation with "the gentle indifference of the world" remains as
compelling as it was when Camus first recounted it. --Ben Guterson --
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