The Stranger by Albert Camus
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Book Reviews of The Stranger
Book Review: Essential Camus.
Summary: 5 Stars
"Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know." This is the voice of Mersault, the main character and narrator. Camus perfectly captures Mersault's detached almost indifferent relation to the world. Not only is Mersault somewhat indifferent to the details of his mother's [Maman's] death, his relationship with his girlfriend is one more of tolerance than attachment, he tends to have acquaintances rather than friends, and, on the whole, has drifted through life. His mother's death sets in action a chain of events that effect a dramatic change in Mersault and, likely, the reader.
Mersault has to attend his mother's funeral and there meets several interesting characters, though only one seems truly to mourn the death of Mersault's mother: her elderly fiancee, Perez. And yet, Camus is able to make gently comic use of the pitiable gentleman.
"We [the funeral procession] got under way. It was then that I noticed that Perez had a slight limp. Little by little, the hearse was picking up speed and the old man was losing ground...I turned around again: Perez seemed to be way back there, fading in the shimmering heat. Then I lost sight of him altogether. I looked around and saw that he'd left the road and cut out across the fields. I also noticed there was a bend in the road up ahead. I realized that Perez, who knew the country, was taking a short cut in order to catch up with us. By the time we rounded the bend, he was back with us. Then we lost him again. He set off cross country once more, and so it went on."
This early sketch is but one example of how Camus, through Mersault, comically captures and illustrates the absurdity that is his subject. Among the many memorable characters that populate the plot are the aforementioned Perez, Salamano and his mangy dog, Mersault's neighbor Raymond, Mersault's girlfriend Marie, and the defense attorney. The plot involves, essentially, Mersault's killing of a stranger on the beach and his trial therefore. The killing and the surrounding circumstances are absurd, as is Mersault's trial.
Mersault's court-appointed defense attorney is "short and chubby, quite young, his hair carefully slicked back." In the first meeting of attorney and client, the attorney focuses primarily on Mersault's apathetic reaction to his mother's death. Mersault does not see the relevance: "I pointed out to him that none of this had anything to do with my case, but all he said was that it was obvious I had never had any dealings with the law." To Mersault's chagrin, the attorney leaves in a huff. "He didn't understand me, and he was sort of holding it against me. I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else."
This passage is important, I believe, to a full understanding of the novel and, particularly, the final paragraph.
In THE STRANGER, Camus manages to communicate on multiple levels, including the comic, the philosophical, and the psychological. While Camus did surpass this effort with later works, notably THE FALL, this remains his most accessible and, therefore, most widely read novel. Camus manages a great deal in such a short book. I highly recommend this book.
Book Review: Undeniably interesting...
Summary: 5 Stars
Camus was well known for defending values of justice, freedom and human dignity, I don't think his great work "the stranger" was a negative portrayal of human life in any way. The stranger is simply Camus' way of presenting his philosophy of absurdity in a very artistic, logical way.
Camus's absurdist philosophy implies that life has no rational meaning, and there isn't a rational reason for the order of events in this world, therefore existence itself is absurd, which of course would contradict all religious beliefs that there is a divine reason for everything that happens and that life itself is divine. However, Camus in pursuit of his absurdist philosophy never believed that the absence of meaning in our lives should push humans into despair and agony, rather he believed in humans dignity under the pressure of this indifferent world.
The stranger, or the main character of the novel: Meursault, who lived in Algiers, (Algiers was a French colony, Albert Camus was born there) is an emotionally indifferent person, who moves through life reacting to no event, even his mother's death. Meursault doesn't believe in God and doesn't have any emotional attachment to anything or anybody. Meursault on the other hand is an honest person who doesn't lie about his feelings and tells it as he sees it; he's simply a person with no hidden agendas and no mysterious motives.
Meursault's life exists as a series of random events with seemingly no logic to why or when the event occur, not even his marriage decision or the support that he gives to certain friends seem logical. For no clear motive or reason, Meursault commits a murder and is taken to prison. The trial that takes place in the second part of the book is the most intense and mentally engaging part of Camus' stranger.
The main focus of the trial shifts radically from the murder to an analysis of Meursault's character: his atheism, his lack of emotions at his mom's funeral, his brief interactions with people he met at his mom's funeral and even his conversation with the priest who came to prison to redeem Meursault and ask him to take Jesus as his savior. The court is trying to find the reason behind this irrational crime, just like society and religion are trying to find reason behind irrational events of life.
Meursault is sentenced to death and pressured again by the priest to choose religion before he dies. At this point, Meursault, who was never emotional about any thing in his life, becomes very emotional about his rejection of religion and accepts death as the only destiny awaiting all humans. Getting rid of all hope, and accepting death was the only conclusion that allowed Meursault his inner peace.
At a time of intense intellectual confusion after the second world war, Camus is not to be blamed for thinking that existence was absurd, at a time where lives are being lost for no reason and religion was being misused all over the world for political ,controlling, and non spiritual reasons. If the reader is interested in philosophy, religion, or literature, the stranger is a fascinating journey into the human mind and an exploration of life's purpose.
Book Review: Subjectivity Distorts Perception
Summary: 5 Stars
.In the story of the Stranger, one finds the lead character, Meursault lacking creativity and of passions within oneself, of the depth of conflict that burns in one's center that moves with chaos and value-positing; none of this can be found in Meursault. He is matter of fact in everything. True, his acceptance and passionless being allows him to under go his ordeal in subdued emotion and unenthusiastic plight, yet this groundlessness and existential being does not excite in living, but simply goes along in existing.
Even in Meursault's act of killing, there lacks any real passionate fervor. His pulling of the trigger was just that; an easy act of the finger and no real understanding, that is, no depth in comprehension of the act itself, but merely a nonchalant action that seems to have been the best alternative of action at the time of occurrence. And yet, the lack of alternative actions is the problem.
In each and every situation in Meursault's life, from the death of his mother to his sexual relationship to his befriending his neighbors, all is performed as a cog in a machine. As each piano key is hit, only to be in succession of what is already programmed on the sheet roll of music. The "last man" mentality of the Lockean view of self-preservation dominates Meursault's life as the bourgeois in existential nothingness and mediocre existence.
Should Meursault suffer as he did for his actions? Were they really so evil? Were his actions simply the result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or in this case, befriending the wrong person who caused these thugs to appear for Meursault to confront? If life can be reduced to existence over conflict then certainly Meursault could be pardoned. But the one must ask if Meursault's action, the act of murder, not of self defense, can ever be excused, simply for the fact that the man who committed such did so from a lack of inner conflict and passion, from an act that simply called to be for the moment it presided in.
The answer to Camus' Meursault comes from our view of subjectivity or objectivity. The Stranger places us in the former as we are personally involved as we read the story from the inside view and thus we side with Meursault. Yet when we are able to detach ourselves and look objectively, we gain a higher perspective and thus a different viewpoint.
Robert Shattuck, from his book Forbidden Knowledge, remarks on The Stranger with the following point, that knowledge can be double bound; subjective or objective;:
"The closer one approaches to an event or to a person, the less securely one seems to know it. The trees obscure the forest. The more one knows, the less one knows. Perception itself requires a certain distance. Empathy hides more than it reveals." p. 162
Our closeness brings empathy, which distorts our power of observation and obscures the facts. That appears to be the case in Camus' The Stranger.
Book Review: Being a spectator of one's own life
Summary: 5 Stars
We are taught, at least through western institutions, to apply sense in everything that happens around us and to us. The "sense" of things is of course there to begin with. By trying to "apply sense" to them, that is, to make our own sense of them we might be not seeing them for what they really are.The Stranger is a person who is literally watching his own life unfold without taking any passionate or particular emotional interest in it. It is as if he is having a peculiar out of body experience without being in a trance.
Many of the people who've read this book find it absurd (as is evident by the reviews of it here in Amazon as well). That's because they do what i mentioned above, they try to apply their own sense to it, and that is the real absurdity.
Life is not one path and it's not monodimensional. The "logic" that one person applies might be sheer madness for the next and so on. Camous's hero is a person detached from his surroundings. He finds it hard to understand why some people think this or the other thing, he finds it equally hard to share emotions that qualify as "normal". He is comfortable in his own world of indifference and becomes uncomfortable when the worlds of others interfere with his. That's what he is or how he is.
When the Stranger becomes a murderer it really comes as no surprise really considering the process via which this happens. Anything could happen to him as he doesn't resist the flow of things, he avoids friction and paradoxically this avoidance of friction that he so intensely pursues leads him to direct confrontation with his environment because of his crime. And this crime is dealt with by the Stranger the same way he's dealt with everything else: he is a spectator of that too.
Camous uses the trial of the Stranger brilliantly. The trial is of course nothing more than a platform the author utilises to bring across a clearer image of the Stranger. And as the final curtain is about to fall the reader is subjected to a very controversial view of the world. Which is? It's just "let me be"...
I think that the reason The Stranger maintains its charm and importance even today (which means that it still touches the pulse of the times) is exactly because our societies are increasingly becoming full of Strangers, full of Spectators, and those who deny it should be accused of hypocrisy. This is not accidental. And, exactly because it is NOT accidental this book remains as important as the day it was first published. Why are we like this? Why have we become what we've become? Is this really our potential? Indifference? Is this all?
Existentialist rhetoric and questions some might say. True, but defining our existence is something most of us are not good at. The questions might be old but they haven't been answered, not in the past 50 years, not in the past 20 centuries. The Stranger asks them too. He's not the only one.
Book Review: Subjectivity Distorts The Facts
Summary: 5 Stars
.In the story of the Stranger, one finds the lead character, Meursault lacking creativity and of passions within oneself, of the depth of conflict that burns in one's center that moves with chaos and value-positing; none of this can be found in Meursault. He is matter of fact in everything. True, his acceptance and passionless being allows him to under go his ordeal in subdued emotion and unenthusiastic plight, yet this groundlessness and existential being does not excite in living, but simply goes along in existing.
Even in Meursault's act of killing, there lacks any real passionate fervor. His pulling of the trigger was just that; an easy act of the finger and no real understanding, that is, no depth in comprehension of the act itself, but merely a nonchalant action that seems to have been the best alternative of action at the time of occurrence. And yet, the lack of alternative actions is the problem.
In each and every situation in Meursault's life, from the death of his mother to his sexual relationship to his befriending his neighbors, all is performed as a cog in a machine. As each piano key is hit, only to be in succession of what is already programmed on the sheet roll of music. The "last man" mentality of the Lockean view of self-preservation dominates Meursault's life as the bourgeois in existential nothingness and mediocre existence.
Should Meursault suffer as he did for his actions? Were they really so evil? Were his actions simply the result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or in this case, befriending the wrong person who caused these thugs to appear for Meursault to confront? If life can be reduced to existence over conflict then certainly Meursault could be pardoned. But the one must ask if Meursault's action, the act of murder, not of self defense, can ever be excused, simply for the fact that the man who committed such did so from a lack of inner conflict and passion, from an act that simply called to be for the moment it presided in.
The answer to Camus' Meursault comes from our view of subjectivity or objectivity. The Stranger places us in the former as we are personally involved as we read the story from the inside view and thus we side with Meursault. Yet when we are able to detach ourselves and look objectively, we gain a higher perspective and thus a different viewpoint.
Robert Shattuck, from his book Forbidden Knowledge, remarks on The Stranger with the following point, that knowledge can be double bound; subjective or objective;:
"The closer one approaches to an event or to a person, the less securely one seems to know it. The trees obscure the forest. The more one knows, the less one knows. Perception itself requires a certain distance. Empathy hides more than it reveals." p. 162
Our closeness brings empathy, which distorts our power of observation and obscures the facts. That appears to be the case in Camus' The Stranger.