Spark Notes The Stranger

By SparkNotes and Albert Camus

Book Overview

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1586634534
• ISBN13: 9781586634537
• Release Date: July 2002
• Publisher: SparkNotes
• Length: 72 Pages
• Weight: 0.24 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.3" x 5.3"

Customer Reviews

A powerfully disturbing and bleak novel

Although Albert Camus had achieved some fame as a journalist in his native Algiers in the thirties and as a writer for the French resistance during WW II, he first achieved an international critical reputation with the publication of this classic novel in 1946. The portrait of the detached, unfeeling, uncommitted, amoral, perpetually abstracted Meursault is one of the most haunting in 20th century literature. For many, it is the supreme 20th century literary depiction of nihilism. Unquestionably it is one of the premier literary efforts of the century, though Camus managed several other books just as powerful and superb in their own way, in particular THE PLAGUE, THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS, and THE FALL.Meursault reminds me so much of figures from the paintings of Manet. In painting after painting, Manet depicted individuals alone in crowds, failing or refusing to interact or even acknowledge the others in the frame. In one famous painting, a lower middle class girl sits alone in her own little orb, sitting beside an upper class gentleman, neither acknowledging the existence of the other, both self-contained, seemingly detached from the busy world surrounding them. Behind them, a barmaid drinks a beer, equally oblivious to everyone and everything around her. They might all be on separate desert islands. Manet repeats this in painting after painting. Meursault seems almost as if he had stepped out of one of those paintings. He can at least communicate with others, socialize with them, but he cannot express strong moral sentiments or develop affectionate (as opposed to sexual) attachments. This is not a happy book. The story deals with Meursault's almost accidental killing of an Arab whose sister had been harmed by one of his acquaintances, but the novel trivializes everything--the killing, his subsequent arrest, his imprisonment, his trial and conviction, and his sentencing. The closest the novel comes to a happy sentiment is near the end when Meursault imagines how much nicer it would be to witness an execution rather than be executed, to have to puke in revulsion than to literally lose one's head to the guillotine. Camus would never write such a despairing book again. THE PLAGUE the next year would come close, but not close, while THE FALL would seem almost optimistic and upbeat in comparison. But for those who want to find perhaps the quintessential expression of what we like to think of as existentialism, this could stand as the premier literary instance.

Absurd Freedom

The Stranger is as beautiful as any work of art can hope to be.It is in the latter parts of the book, where Mersault's words have a lyrical power not seen previous, that the English translation achieves the haunting effect that must be even more prevalent in the French. The first thing readily obvious is that the character has no emotional connection to what he experiences; he simply experiences. Thus, Camus utilizes an American style, terse and detached. Some reviewers were off put by this. "How could he not care that his mother died? " Attaching immorality to Mersault merely shows a total misunderstanding of the book. Camus believed in "absurd freedom," life has no inner value and is futilely cut short, but it is up to us to determine our life in such uncertainty. If one doesn't interpret life, emotion doesn't exist. But the values that society has incriminate you if you don't conform. They make you strange. They take no account of individuality. That is the peril of the main character after a bizarre series of events on a sun drenched beach. The power of Camus is that even though he creates such a bleak, hopeless human situation the characters still go on as best they can, perhaps even attaining happiness. "One must imagine Sisyphus happy," to quote The Myth of Sisyphus. That is also the power and beauty of mankind.

An existentialist tour de force of literature

The Stranger is a haunting, challenging masterpiece of literature. While it is fiction, it actually manages to express the complex concepts and themes of existential philosophy better than the movement's most noted philosophical writings and almost as well as Dostoyevsky's Notes From the Underground. This is a new kind of literature. The story in and of itself is rather simple, but the glimpses into the intellect and feelings of the protagonist are the sources of the magic of this novel. M.Meursault is a normal man in Algiers, France. When we meet him, he is on the way to his mother's funeral, where he says very little, expresses no remorse over her death, and immediately returns home. The next day, he goes swimming, meets Marie, takes her to see a comedy that night, and spends the next few weeks living his normal life and occassionally seeing Marie. He ends up getting indirectly involved in a dispute between his neighbor Raymond and a girl who did him wrong, and the conflict culminates in an encounter on the beach between Raymond, Meursault, and the girl's Arab brother and friend. Raymond is cut with a knife, but the whole episode seems to be resolved. Meursault, though, decides later to take another walk on the beach because he is too worn out to go inside and rejoin his friends, and somewhat inexplicably he ends up killing one of the Arabs. The second half of the novel examines Meursault's thoughts in relation to his trial and sentence; interestingly, he is prosecuted as much if not more for his moral character than for the crime of murder itself.Basically, Meursault does not care about anything, does not feel anything for anyone (including himself, for the most part). He looks at life objectively and determines that it really doesn't matter whether he does something or not in the overall scheme of things. When Marie expresses her love for him, he tells her he will marry her if it will make her happy but that he cannot say he really loves her. He expresses no remorse for killing the Arab because it just happened; he had no intention of doing it, but the fact is that he did, so there's little point in dwelling on it. He cares about the present and, to a lesser degree, the future, but the past is meaningless for the very reason that it is the past. Meursault sees things as they are; rather than rely on flights of fantasy and imagination (the typical tools of the Romanticists), he deals with facts in the here and now rather than run from them and has no problem admitting the seemingly obvious fact that man is a creature of utter depravity. He rejects religion; since each man must eventually die, what does it matter what he does while on earth. It is a man's hopes and dreams that weigh down his very existence; Marsault can only find happiness by cleansing himself of all such illusory notions.Needless to say, this is not an uplifting book, but it is an engaging, thought-provoking one. While Camus cannot be called a true existentia

Is this book the existentialist bible? No.

The other reviewers base their interpretation of this novel on the belief that Camus was an Existentialist and that Camus presented Meursault as a hero. Concerning the last point, nothing could be further from the truth. Before interpreting "The Stranger", one should first read Camus' essays on his own personal philosophy of "The Absurd" and how he relates it to the myth of Sisyphus. These essays reveal that Camus' personal philosophy was distinct from Existentialism in that he imagined that Sisyphus could be happy even though he was condemned to roll a huge stone up a hill in Hades only to have it roll down again on nearing the top. Similarly, Camus believed that people could be fulfilled by searching for the meaning of life even though they know they will not be able to discover it. Consequently, Meursault is not a hero in Camus' eyes because Mersault has given up trying to find meaning in his life and accepts without struggle the lack of emotion and spirit in it. In other words, don't trust everything that was written on the back cover of the american paperback edition of this novel. The back cover contained incorrect information that misled many readers, including myself, about the true meaning of this work. Read Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays" before interpreting "The Stranger" and new meaning will become apparent from this excellent and frightening novel.

The Stranger: Slow-paced is better?

In sports, to examine the action closely, they do a slow-motion instant replay. The Stranger by Albert Camus is slow paced; there's one scene in the beginning where the main character, Meursault, describes in full detail his day, in which he looked out the window. That was all, Meursault just talked about the people who walked by that day. However, this single fault the book has is necessary in order to understand and accept Camus' existentialist message. Like a slow-motion replay of fast action, only when Camus slows down the life of Meursault does the reader see the entire picture. The famous image of the novel is Meursault shooting an Arab man on the beach. A fast paced action novel would not have given much detail-- which would have missed Camus' message. Saying that Meursault shot an Arab does not tell the reader anything, but having Meursault describe in full detail the unbearable nature of the heat that day, about the sweat running down his forehead and the sun pounding on his back, and by leaving out any thoughts about the morality of his actions, only then do we understand Camus' message. There is no God out there who care, he could shoot or not shoot, it would not matter either way. What drove Meursault to kill the Arab was not distorted morals, that it would be right for him to kill the Arab on a spiritual or vengeful level. Rather, Meursault killed the Arab because it was hot that day. He is driven by honest emotions only, and Meursault will be persecuted for this later on. Slowing down the pace also makes the story seem that much more real and detailed. I imagined the bullets Meursault shoots at the beach in the same slow motion style that was used in The Matrix. Also, the scenes in which he breaks his placid persona, such as the one in which Meursault attacks a visiting chaplain, are heightened dramatically by the slow pace. The outburst of emotion is far more exciting with a low key atmosphere surrounding it. This is important because the scene with the chaplain, where he discovers his own beliefs (existentialism), is one of the key parts of the novel. Normally I do not like a slow paced novel, but I'm willing to make an exception with The Stranger. By slowing down the action, the theme becomes easier to understand and the images become far more absorbing. Oddly enough, it would appear that the book's only inherent flaw makes the novel better on the whole, and therefore I would not be exaggerating if I said The Stranger was flawless.