The Stranger
— 1942 —
New York: Vintage International, 1989; translated from the French by Matthew Ward; 123 pages; originally published in French as L’Étranger in 1942
FIRST LINES
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.
PLOT SUMMARY
A Frenchman living in Algiers receives news that his mother has died. Given two days off to attend her funeral, Monsieur Meursault arrives at his mother’s nursing home, sits a vigil, and then goes through the motions at her funeral service. Distant, unmoved, even apathetic, Meursault shows little outward grief to the home’s director and staff.
As a small group proceeds to the cemetery, a nurse warns him not to walk too fast or too slow. “She was right,” Meursault says, telling his own story. “There was no way out.”
Those words carry great meaning.
In this classic work of absurdist literature, Meursault returns home and renews a relationship with a former lover, but he still feels numb. “It occurred to me that anyway one more Sunday was over, that Maman was buried now, that I was going back to work, and that, really, nothing had changed.”
But soon, everything changes. During an otherwise beautiful day at the beach, Meursault is caught up in an act of sudden violence.
An arrest, imprisonment, and ultimately a trial follow in the novella’s second half. A parade of witnesses will scrutinize all of the seemingly innocent events in Meursault’s day-to-day life. His lack of grief and his apathetic nature weigh heavily against him. Was that nurse right? Was there no way out?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: ALBERT CAMUS
One of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, to French parents in Algeria, a French colony at the time. His father, a farmworker, died in the First Battle of the Marne, one of the first massive battles of World War I, fought outside Paris in 1914. His mother took up housecleaning and the family moved to a small apartment with grandparents and an uncle.
Raised in relative poverty, Camus was able to attend a prestigious secondary school near Algiers. At seventeen, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and had to abandon his love of swimming and playing goalkeeper for his soccer club. Camus began to study philosophy and, with a scholarship, attended the University of Algiers part-time while working odd jobs to earn money.
As Fascism spread in Europe in the 1930s, Camus moved to France to edit the Paris-soir newspaper. When World War II began in 1939, he tried to enlist in the French army but was rejected due to his poor health. After the Nazis invaded France, he left Paris and married Francine Faure, a mathematician and pianist, and they returned to Algeria, where Camus taught school in the city of Oran.
Advised to move to improve his health, he returned to France, eventually landing in Nazi-occupied Paris. Living on the Left Bank near the headquarters of the German military police, Camus worked as a manuscript reader for French publisher Gallimard, which had been permitted to continue publishing by the Nazis. At the same time, Camus was working with the French Resistance, taking great risk to secretly write and edit Combat, a banned anti-Fascist newspaper, while simultaneously writing a novel, a play, and a philosophical essay.
In 1942, Gallimard published his novel The Stranger to a strong reception in Paris literary circles. It was the same year that Camus published The Myth of Sisyphus, a book-length essay in which he used the ancient Greek tale of a man condemned to endlessly roll a boulder up a hill as a symbol of the absurdity of human effort. In this Paris of the 1940s, Camus became part of the extraordinary circle of French writers and intellectuals that included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
Lecturing widely after the war, Camus then published two more of his most consequential books, the novel La Peste (1947, The Plague) and another book-length essay, L’Homme révolté (1951, The Rebel). Rejecting communism as another form of totalitarianism, Camus split from Sartre and other contemporaries.
A surprise came in 1957, when Camus received news of his Nobel Prize. At age forty-four, he was the second-youngest recipient, after Rudyard Kipling, forty-two when he won. The Nobel Committee cited Camus “for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times.”
Accepting the award, Camus said, “By the same token, the writer’s role is not free from difficult duties. By definition he cannot put himself today in the service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it.”
On January 4, 1960, at the age of forty-six, Camus died in a car crash with his publisher, Michael Gallimard.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ IT
The Stranger is one of the most widely read French novels of the twentieth century. It is also, according to critic Claire Messud, “the exemplary existentialist novel,” despite the author’s rejection of the label.
And here is why it should be read: The Stranger allows you to ponder a philosophy by living in a man’s head and hearing his thoughts. Listen to Meursault as he realizes:
Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why…. Throughout the whole absurd life I’d lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, the wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time.
If you’ve read it before, read it for a new translation. Until 1988, readers opened the 1946 English translation of The Stranger and encountered these famous three words: “Mother died today.”
But a revised English translation published that year—beginning with “Maman died today”—was meant to better capture a sense of the author’s original, and less formal, sensibility. “Camus admitted using an ‘American method,’ particularly in the first half of the book,” Matthew Ward, translator of the 1988 edition, told the New York Times. “He mentioned Hemingway, Dos Passos, Faulkner and James M. Cain as influences. My feeling is that ‘The Stranger’ is more like Cain’s ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’ [see entry] than Camus cared to admit.”
In his highly compressed but haunting narrative, Camus explored the very meaning of existence. Meursault’s story represents what Camus called “the nakedness of a man faced with the absurd.” Tight, short sentences—the staccato style of the great “hard-boiled” novels—build to the abrupt and unexpected violence that changes Meursault’s life.
WHAT TO READ NEXT
Apart from his fiction, Camus was best known for his philosophical works. Perhaps the most famous of these, written at about the same time as The Stranger, was The Myth of Sisyphus, published in 1942. In it, Camus addressed what he saw as the crucial issue: “Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest… comes afterwards.”
While begun earlier in his life, the book-length essay was completed as people fled from the advance of the Nazis. It is admittedly a more challenging read than The Stranger. In it, Camus argued that human existence in an absurd universe is similar to the Greek story of Sisyphus, the “absurd hero,” who has been condemned to eternally roll a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll down again.
As for his other fiction, another masterpiece that has gained new relevance and attracted much attention during the Covid pandemic is The Plague. This 1947 novel begins as a pestilence is sweeping the Algerian city of Oran during World War II. As rats die and the whole town is sickened by a deadly fever, Camus examines the response of the people to the outbreak.
“The plague is, of course, the virus of Fascism,” historian Jill Lepore wrote in the midst of the Covid pandemic. “No one in the town gives much thought to the rats until it’s too late—even though the plague ‘rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views’—and few pay sufficient attention to the rats even after it’s too late.”