Albert Camus (1913–1960), Nobel Prize laureate in 1957, published the novella The Stranger in 1942, one of the most widely read, studied, and analyzed texts of the last century. The plot is brief: the protagonist, Meursault, is a modest clerk in Algiers, then a French colony. He seems to live day by day, repeating the same gestures, the same encounters. He hates Sundays because there is too much free time, which he spends sitting at the window watching life unfold below. He appears apathetic, indifferent to everything: to his mother’s death, to his relationship with Marie, and even to the murder he commits under a blazing sun, when “the sweat gathered in my eyebrows dripped onto my eyelids and veiled them with a warm, heavy film.”
Algiers, 1938. Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), a quiet and detached clerk, attends his mother’s funeral without showing any emotion. The next day he begins a relationship with Marie (Rebecca Marder), a co-worker, and soon slips back into his daily routine. But when his neighbor...
There is very little indirect speech. The protagonist seems lacking in depth, yet entirely sincere in denying the value of marriage and God, and in refusing any repentance for an act carried out almost by chance. The story takes its place within the great debate on existentialism, in which Kierkegaard and, even more so, Kafka appear closer to Camus than Sartre ever did. In the quiet daily life of the protagonist we find echoes of The Myth of Sisyphus, also published in 1942, the theoretical reference point of The Stranger, particularly in the chapter on “absurd freedom”: “If I were a tree among trees… this life would have meaning, or rather the problem would not arise, because I would be part of the world… but man… the hell of the present is finally his kingdom.”
