While I was on my Mormon mission in the Franco-Belgian area in the 1960s, I found somebody’s list of the 100 most important novels of western civilization. On the list were two novels by the french writer Albert Camus: The Stranger (or The Outsider) and the Plague. I purchased a copy of The Stranger and in short order read it. I found it very compelling, perhaps in the same way other young people find J. D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” haunting.
I wrote the following four paragraphs for an English class at BYU in 1968 (after my mission):
“Albert Camus loves to startle his readers. The first sentence in the The Stranger is an excellent example: “Mother died today.” The story which unravels after this first sentence is equally startling. All the action takes place in and around the city of Algiers in northern Africa. The hero of The Stranger — Meursault — is a office clerk who is completely indifferent to everything except his immediate sensations — the sun, his girl friend, the sea, and the beach. Such things as the death of his mother, the offer of a promotion, and the love of his girl friend are not important to him.”
“In section one, the author deals with the funeral of the hero’s mother and with how the hero drifts into a situation in which, dazed by the sun, he shoots an Arab who appears to be menacing him with a knife. However after firing the initial shot, Meursault fires five more shots into the body.”
“Section two deals with the trial. Meursault’s lawyer assures him of his acquittal if he pleads self-defense and expresses the right sentiments. But the hero is incapable of pretending to emotions he does not possess. His complete honesty at his trial make him appear a monster, and he sentenced to be guillotined. The imminence of death makes him conscious of something he had always taken for granted: life’s meaninglessness. Empty of hope he realizes that he had been happy and is still happy.”
“Camus loves to startle his readers. The last sentence in The Stranger is an excellent example:
For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.”
In 1997, I journeyed to southern France. While there, I visited Camus’s grave. It is located in a small cemetary in a beautiful corner of Mediterrean Europe. There is a sign near the cemetary gate that helps pilgrims locate the unassuming grave site. Camus died at the age of 46 in an automobile wreck. His tragic death has often been compared to the premature demise of Meursault, but the comparison is serious flawed.
Another quote from my 1968 English paper:
“Meursault passes judgment on no one. He befriends the man who lives upstairs. This neighbor is not only a pimp but his mistress is an Arab. Meursault, how has just lost his mother, in one of the more ironic scenes in The Stranger consoles another neighbor who just lost his scabby dog. While everyone else seems to despise these two men, Meursault refuses to judge either.”
J.D. Salinger died on 27 Jan 2010 at his home in Cornish, N.H. He was the hermit crab of American letters. “When he emerged, it was usually to complain that somebody was poking at his shell.” The following was written by Richard Lacayo about his only novel:
“Salinger’s only novel, ‘The Catcher in the Rye,’ was published in 1951 (9 years after ‘The Stranger,’ my comment), and gradually achieved a status that made him cringe. For decades, the book was a universal rite of passage for adolescents, the manifesto of disenchanted youth. (Sometimes lethally so: after he killed John Lennon in 1980, Mark David Chapman said he had done it to promote the reading of Salinger’s book.) Holden Caulfield, Salinger’s petulant, yearning young hero, was the original angry young man, created at the very moment that American teenage culture was being born. A whole generation of rebellious youths discharged themselves into him.”
Meursault was not an angry young man.
Lacayo comment is from Time Magazine (15 Feb 2010, p. 66).