The Stranger by Albert Camus
|
List Price: Our Price: $3.94 You Save: $9.01 (70%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of The Stranger
Book Review: The original slacker...
Summary: 5 Stars
When I shut Camus' "The Stranger", my mind was hushed. It was a very odd book that made me think. Unsure of the books meaning, I read some of the reveiws here, and, slowly, and opinion began to form in my mind. First off, Mersault, the narrator, is the most passive, static symbol I've ever encountered in literature. The nearest analog would be Billy Pilgrim from Vonnegut's "Slaughter House Five", I suppose, but Mersault is a different animal all together. His entire world is bloodless, and, using modern brain theory, left hemispheric; lineal, rational. Yet, it is this very bloodless existance that Camus is objecting to, at least in my reading of the novel. Mersault is a slacker, neither good nor bad. He is simply there. Sure, he's intelligent, but he's got no insight. He's caught in a reality beyond his control, a material reality that never changes. He's pleasent, interested in others, but unemotional and detatched. The only thing he responds to are changes in his material organism; heat, low blood sugar. That sort of thing. In a way, Mersault is no different from the other characters in the novel caught in life's games. The judge and lawyers, society at large, all seem to condem him, as easily as they'd have accepted him if there hadn't been a murder. Mersault's main problem is that he does not move a finger to change his life. Like a pure Aristotle, filled with cold scientific detatchment, he simply observes, never interfering with a reality that has become a lifeless, bloodless, material trap. Even though he sees the lawyers playing a game with his life that could result in his death, he does nothing to stop it. We, who've seen the murder through his eyes, understand that Mersault felt treatened by the Arab and his knife. We know he did not pre-meditate the murder. Yet he murdered. He did it coldly, but not in cold blood. Yet he doesn't make a move, becomes a pawn in a pointless 'game' between the self-righteous magistrate and the less talented defender. The question that troubled me time and time again, and probably everyone else who's read the book, is why? Why not take an impassioned stand? Why not inveigh against the absurdity of reality, why not fight for life? Why be happy to be imprisoned in society's little game of good versus evil? Why would Mersault not feel sad during his mother's funeral? Mersault simply allows life to work on him, observes what he sees coldly and accurately. His observations about the foolishness of the law, the fact that even the most self-important 'doormen' in this life are still inmates, all ring true. He notices how opposites fit together, yet depend on the other for their existance; Salmano and his dog; the magistrate and the defense; good and bad. Remeber how dejected Salamano felt after his dog, the cur he'd despised, was lost...This strange, dialectic stasis holds the world together. In some way, since Mersault is neutral, he is beyond it all, yet, like all men, is caught in its web. In the end, he becomes serious about the game, and secretly hopes that his execution will be attended by a crowd of spectators, howling in execration. In effect, what I feel Camus is trying to do in the "Stranger" is much more involved than the reading most others here have given the book. He's giving us a symbol of the limits of rational, Aristotilean thought. Pure science has given us the bomb, turned humans into machines. It has made western man maybe a little more intelligent than the animalistic Raymond, but at the expense of depriving him of a reality deeply alive, awash in blood and emotion. Our intelligence has made us robots, unable to see the face of God in the stones that imprison us, which the preist, probably the only truly passionate and sympathetic character in the book, hopes that the listless Mersault, the most modern of men, could see.Book Review: Hello
Summary: 5 Stars
The Stranger was the first novel of Camus' labeled "absurd," and it defines Camus for most Americans. The plot is quite simple, with none of the diversions common in popular literature. The main character is not a hero, has no "true" love affair and the pursuit of money and power never enters the story. The Stranger is an honest atheist, waiting for life to happen.The title l'Etranger, has been poorly translated. The U.S. title, The Stranger, implies that the main character, Meursault, has been viewed as a "strange" or "odd" person for some time. The other possible meaning is that no one knows him. Meursault is a stranger even to those who think they know him. These definitions do not seem adequate. The U.K. title, The Outsider, only serves to confuse readers even more.
Meursault is the archetype of a middle-class man. He works as a clerk, rents an apartment and draws no attention to himself. He is, if anything, very ordinary. Meusault might even be boring. He lacks deep convictions and passion. If he is estranged from any aspect of French society, it is religion--he does not believe in the symbols and the rituals of faith.
Estranged? "Cela m'est égal."
Along with the title, Camus took care in naming the main character. Meursault's name is symbolic of the Mediteranean sea. Mer mean "sea" and soliel is French for "sun." The sea and the sun meet at the beach, where Meursault's defining actions occur.
Meusault is an anti-hero. His only redeeming quality is his honesty, no matter how absurd. In existential terms, he is "authentic" to himself. Meusault does not believe in God, but he cannot lie because he is true to himself. This inability to falsify empathy ultimately condemns him. Meursault has faith only in what he, himself, can see or experience with his other senses. He is not a philosopher, a theologian or a deep thinker. Meursault exists as he is, not trying to be anything more or less than himself.
Why did Camus' readers recognize Meursault as a plausible character? After two World Wars and much suffering, many people came to live life much as Meursault does. Or at least they tried to do so. These people lost the will to do more than exist. There was no hope and no desire. The only goal for many people was simple survival. Even then, the survival seemed empty and hollow. We learn how empty Meursault's existence is through his relationships. He is not close to his mother; we learn he does not cry at her funeral. He does not seem close to his lover, Marie Cardona. Of her, Meursault states, "To me, she was only Marie." There is no passion is Meursault's words or in his life.
What sets Camus apart from many existentialists and modern philosophers in general is his acceptance of contradiction. Yes, Camus wrote, life is absurd and death renders life meaningless--for the individual. But mankind and its societies are larger than any one individual person.
Book Review: The Stranger by Albert Camus
Summary: 5 Stars
The Stranger by Albert Camus
The novel was published in 1942 and it was Camus' first novel. It won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957.
The setting of the novel is in French Algeria. Camus begins the story with Meursault, the narrator, stating: "Mother died today." It is a terrific opening line; a great line to get the reader's attention.
The plot is simple. Meursault, the main character who is also the narrator, is a Frenchman living in French Algiers. He attends his mother's funeral but he does not exhibit grief over the death of his mother. His actions and behavior show that he seemed unaffected by his mother's death, which of course was very disturbing to me as the reader. He carries on with his life as though nothing had happened. He narrates the uninteresting events in his daily life culminating in his senseless murder of an Arab man. The book is divided into Part One (before the murder) and Part Two (after the murder). Part One ends with a description of the murder, which to me, was the climax of the story. Part two deals with the trial. He is condemned to die by guillotine.
After reading the novel, the interest, at least for me, is not so much the details of the plot but the personality of Meursault, the literary devices used by Camus to dramatize highpoints or turning points in the story, and of course Camus' philosophy that the world and society are essentially absurd and indifferent; life is meaningless; the randomness of violence and death. We are like ships tossed about in a stormy sea. Society does not care about you as a person and therefore, it is up to you as an individual to find meaning in life. But in the end what is the use? Does it really matter? Thinkers and philosophers refer to this way of thinking as existentialism. The novel is perceived a classic example of existentialism. Camus used the thoughts and the personality of the main character, Meursault, to illustrate and underline his existentialist philosophy.
Meursault is emotionally impoverished; he has no passion in life. He is dispassionate and detached. He works as a clerk or secretary and the characteristic attribute of his life is dullness: sleeping, going to work. He exhibits neither excitement nor enthusiasm for living. One day is pretty much like another day.
Meursault attributes his killing of the Arab man as "chance." Meursault expresses neither guilt nor regret. It was just chance and the heat of the day; as if he was not at all responsible for the crime. The incident occurs on a beach in Algiers, when Meursault, his girlfriend Marie, and his friend Raymond spend a weekend at the beach. There was no motive to the killing. It was a reflex reaction to a self-perceived threat. What he felt, what his emotions were during that crucial and fatal encounter, Meursault does not tell us. During that fatal moment, Meursault focused more on describing the heat at the beach where the murder occurred and how the heat affected his senses. It would seem as though the extreme heat and glare of the sun caused him to kill the Arab. The best passage in the book occurs in this section, the conclusion of Part One. In this passage, we can appreciate Camus' brilliance as a writer by his use of word imagery to move the story. I consider the passage one of the finest examples of descriptive writing.
The book is a great read but I did not like the personality of the main character and I do not agree with the author's philosophy that the world and society are indifferent, that life is meaningless. We give meaning and direction to our life. The world is what we make it. The book raises timeless questions about ethics, the meaning and direction of life and social justice.
Book Review: An existentialist tour de force of literature
Summary: 5 Stars
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 existentialist in his own philosophical outlook, his fiction does epitomize many existentialist ideas. Marsault is a protagonist like no other in literature--you cannot like him, he is obviously guilty of killing a man in cold blood, and he is of a cold-hearted nature, yet you do understand some of his thinking, find yourself more and more interested in his dark outlook on life, and have to admit that much of what he believes makes sense.
Book Review: A View of Atheism in the Stranger
Summary: 5 Stars
My reading of Camus' The Stranger triggered a dual response. It caused me to harbor a great contempt for it as well as a respect for the thought-provoking mastery of its message. This reaction was precipitated by a feeling that Camus, through the voice of Meursault is incredibly arrogant. I believe that atheism is as hypocritical as religion. Either extreme requires a confidence which no man can truly possess. Either is a denial of the doubt that makes us human. It is the questions that we cannot answer that make us who we are. An acceptance of the "benign indifference of the universe" only brings happiness in its finality. It closes the question of death and the unknown, ending the accompanying fears. It is man's futile attempt to grasp the nature of existence by denying its significance. People have a similarly feignedly apathetic response when greeted with a question of trivia that they cannot answer or answer incorrectly. They simply say, "It doesn't matter." Another hypocrisy in this book is the presence of a so-called existentialist hero. If man defines his existence individually why does he need another man to be his hero and the exemplar of his beliefs? In fact, if it is true that there is no meaning in life, then why does it matter that Camus' message be heard? He must record his message because he cannot deny his humanity. It is his humanity that makes him ask "why," and feel compelled to share it with the world. He cannot be the true existentialist. No man can. It is just as true that no man can truly believe in God without consciously deluding himself. He is aware of his doubt at every step in his life, and blinds himself with affirmations and professions of his faith. However, all these ideologies must be respected and are popular in literature for the reason that they attempt to answer the unanswerable question which is the most important in our lives, "Who am I and why do I exist?" Everything we do is connected to this question, all of our decisions and all of our thought. We continually ask, "How do I fit into the system? What is my role in the community? Where does my community fit into the world? Where does my world fit into the universe?" The human race is incurably narcissistic and homocentric. It may seem cynical to believe man incapable of ever comprehending the universe. On the other hand, this seems to be a tenet of many religions and a truth to most atheists. Agnosticism is the only logical conclusion we can draw from these realities. Who can say with certainty what is and what is not? There are over 10,000 species on this planet alone, and things change every day. Science can test the physical and conclude on temporary truths, but the spirit is un-testable. Reality exists for each of us in relativity. But these relative truths are not absolute reality. It is an aphorism that this truth must exist, for the universe does not only exist in our minds. When a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, it makes a sound. However, knowledge and comprehension of this absolute reality is beyond our reach. As Albert Einstein once said, "Nothing in science is final, but the truth is real." Science here can easily be substituted with life. Our minds are but the imperfect lenses through which we see the universe.