A Reading of “The Stranger” by Albert Camus
Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.”
This is how the novel that changed the face of modern literature begins—not with a shocking sentence, but with shock as a sentence.
In fewer than ten words, Meursault announces his retreat from the expected emotional theater—not as rebellion, but as truth.
It all feels neutral. No tears. No sympathy. Not even a moral question.
But what’s narrated here is not the mother’s death. It’s the death of the shared language we use to talk about loss.
In The Stranger, Albert Camus isn’t writing about a man who killed someone on a beach.
He’s writing about an idea: that man is not always judged for what he does, but for failing to perform the social script others expect.
To be completely honest, in this world, is a kind of betrayal.
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Meursault: When Truth Becomes the Crime
Meursault hides nothing. He doesn’t stammer. He offers no justifications.
He receives events as they are, without trying to decorate them internally.
When someone asks him early in the novel about his mother’s death, he replies simply:
“Yes, she died. I guess I was supposed to say: my mother passed away. But that means nothing to me. Everything had already died.”
No one can tolerate this kind of speech.
Society doesn’t want truth—it wants the performance of it.
People cry at funerals not always because they’re heavy with grief, but because they know that’s what is expected.
But Meursault doesn’t reject death… he simply refuses to act out grief.
When he stands in court, he doesn’t plead. He simply says,
“I told the truth, but it seemed like they didn’t understand me.”
None of his behavior defies the world—he just refuses to play its game.
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The Crime: A Mere Physical Reflex
One of the novel’s most famous scenes is the moment of the murder.
Yet, unlike most crime scenes, it lacks premeditation, emotion, or dramatic flair.
Meursault says:
“The sun was unbearable… I felt as if the light was hitting me like a fist… so I pulled the trigger.”
The killer here is not a man driven by hatred, but a body overwhelmed by intolerable heat.
The murder is the inevitable result of a sensory tension—a purely physical moment.
And that’s exactly what makes it absurd.
The crime doesn’t happen because the world is evil, or because Meursault is wicked.
It happens simply because it happens.
The world offers no explanation.
No one replies.
And the sun—a symbol of life—becomes a weapon: blinding the senses, pushing toward violence, exposing the fragility of will.
Camus points to this: life needs no reason to rush toward its own edge.
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The Trial: What You Didn’t Cry For, Kills You
The court isn’t interested in how the crime happened.
They care about how he felt before and after.
They don’t judge Meursault for killing a man.
They judge him for not crying at his mother’s funeral, for going to the movies afterward, for not asking for forgiveness.
Meursault says:
“I felt like they were judging me for not being like them.”
At one point, he describes the courtroom as a stage, where everyone knows their lines.
Except him—the outsider—who doesn’t know the script.
The frightening part of the novel isn’t the murder, but the trial of emotion.
A society that doesn’t ask: what did you do?
But: why didn’t you feel the way a person is supposed to feel?
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Absurdity: When the Universe Goes Silent
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus writes:
“Absurdity lies neither in man alone, nor in the world alone, but in their presence together.”
In The Stranger, this presence reaches its peak in silence.
Every attempt to explain reality collapses, because reality never responds.
There is no hidden meaning.
No thread connecting past to present.
Just raw existence—repeating without purpose, like sunlight, like shifting sand, like footsteps moving toward an end with no map.
So Meursault doesn’t rebel.
He simply stands still before a universe that doesn’t answer back.
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Indifference: A Freedom Humanity Can’t Handle
Meursault seems indifferent.
But deep down, he practices the highest form of awareness.
He isn’t fooled. He doesn’t fake. He doesn’t run toward comfortable lies.
This isn’t apathy—it’s real peace with meaninglessness.
It’s a moment where he realizes that the world, in its silence, asks nothing of him—
and so, it can’t betray him either.
The prosecution turns Meursault into a narrative tool.
He becomes a monster not because of what he did,
but because he didn’t cry at the funeral,
because he slept the next day,
because he didn’t seek redemption.
Justice, here, doesn’t care about what happened,
but about what appeared to happen—
as if truth needs to be acted, not told.
In his cell, he doesn’t scream.
He doesn’t resist.
He doesn’t mourn.
He lives his final moment just as he lived all the others: as it is.
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Meursault as a Test: How Much Truth Can We Take?
Meursault doesn’t reject life—he sees it.
He accepts it without the need to decorate or explain it.
He doesn’t say: “Nothing matters.”
He says: “Everything just is.”
He isn’t mentally ill, sadistic, or melodramatically tortured.
He’s simply someone who sees no reason to wear a mask.
And that—
in a world soaked in performative meaning—
is unbearable.
That’s why The Stranger becomes a terrifying mirror.
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Death: The Ultimate Expression of Absurdity
When sentenced to death, Meursault doesn’t ask for mercy.
Instead, he says:
“I feel that everything is right, and nothing could have been different.”
In his raw confrontation with death,
in his complete acceptance of ending without illusion,
he becomes free—
more human than anyone else.
And in the final sentence, he says:
“I had to hope that there would be a large crowd at my execution, and that they would greet me with cries of hatred.”
Even hatred, in the absence of meaning, becomes a kind of recognition.
A final comfort.
A confirmation that life, despite its absurdity, still reacts to you.
Death, then, is the only thing that asks nothing of us.
No feeling.
No act.
No mask.
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Salvation in Absurdity
Meursault, in the end, is not a hero or a victim—
but a human without a shell.
The novel doesn’t tell his tragedy—
it forces us to taste life when told without sugar.
The Stranger isn’t meant to be loved.
It’s meant to disturb.
It’s not a personal novel—it’s a philosophical one.
It makes the reader face the first, most brutal question:
Can you live without meaning?
Is truth enough to survive?
Or is survival, as everyone knows, a game of actors?
Meursault doesn’t answer.
But he said:
“I never rejected life. I just never found a reason to pretend I understood it.”
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Conclusion: Meursault Is Not a Name — It’s an Idea
The Stranger isn’t just about Meursault.
It’s about anyone who’s ever felt that the world didn’t understand them because they didn’t perform as expected.
That’s why Meursault isn’t just a symbol of absurdity—
he’s a test of how much unfiltered truth we can bear.
He doesn’t take stances, carry messages, or try to “fix” the world.
He simply lives.
And that alone was enough to strip him of his humanity in the world’s eyes.
To them, he embodied the most terrifying thing a human can be.
