Albert Camus's 1942 novel, titled either or The Outsider
For the uninitiated, The Stranger -The Outsider- opens with one of the most jarring sentences in literature: “Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure.”
The legal system acts as the proxy for society. Meursault is condemned not because he killed a man, but because he did not play the role of the mourner. He refused to participate in the "game" of social conventions. By not crying, he has violated the unspoken contract of humanity. The prosecutor paints him as a monster with a soul so void that the crime was inevitable. The Stranger -The Outsider-
depending on the translation, is a landmark of 20th-century literature. It explores the "philosophy of the absurd"—the conflict between the human search for meaning and the "gentle indifference" of a universe that provides none.
Perhaps the hyphen in the keyword “The Stranger -The Outsider-” is the most important punctuation in literature. It represents a bridge. It tells us that to be fully human in an absurd universe, we are all both. We are strangers to the lies of society, and we are outsiders to the fiction of meaning. And like Meursault, on the last morning of our lives, we must hope that the only truth left is the furious, silent, indifferent love of a world that never promised us anything at all. Albert Camus's 1942 novel, titled either or The
Camus used Meursault to illustrate his philosophy of : the conflict between the human longing for order and meaning and the silent, chaotic universe.
Meursault, a clerk living in French Algiers, attends his mother’s funeral. He does not cry. He drinks coffee, smokes a cigarette, and sleeps. The next day, he begins a casual affair with a former coworker, Marie, and helps a neighbor, Raymond, write a vicious letter to an Arab mistress. Life proceeds with mechanical indifference. He refused to participate in the "game" of
Meursault refuses to lie.
Most people cope by lying. We pretend our jobs matter. We pretend rituals (funerals, weddings, courtroom decorum) hold cosmic weight. We create “God” or “Progress” or “Love” to fill the void.
: Meursault is a "stranger" to society because he refuses to "play the game" of social performance. Sensory Dominance
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