Sunlight and Absurdity: Why Camus’s The Stranger Still Unsettles Us
Albert Camus’s The Stranger is an unsettling little book. It envelops its readers in the barren, sunlit psyche of a detached narrator whose indifference to himself and the world is plain from the start. Published in 1942, the novel is a far-sighted philosophical study that crystallizes absurdist thought, laying bare the futility of societal rituals, the emptiness of conventional morality, and the strange peace one can find in accepting meaninglessness. This ‘Stranger’, as readers have come to know him, lives in psychological exile in a sweltering Algiers. He is indifferent to society, unable to engage with it, pouring his observations into a narrative that can barely contain their implications. Often, he puzzles others. He accepts his nature without question.
The novel opens in a startling key. It reveals the narrator’s fundamental disconnect through his mother’s death. “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday,” he says, as if stating the weather is also to assert his distance from human sentiment. But his identity, born of pure sensory experience and emotional vacancy, is only a prison from which he can do little but watch the machinery of justice turn inexorably against him. He stands apart from ‘the moral man’, rejecting the notion that human actions must align with social expectations and exposing society’s faith in performed emotion as artifice. Human pretence is impossible for him: people are creatures of sensation and immediate response. For Meursault, to be human is to exist without pretence, without justification, even without intended meaning — traits he neither celebrates nor regrets in himself.
The story that follows is split into two. Each is distinct in shape and tone. The first is a chronicle, even a diary, in which Meursault drifts between observation and action; it serves as a lengthy prelude to his fatal moment. He describes his encounters with everything, from sunlight to society to love. He approaches life with detachment. His tone is precise, his observations flowing from his mind so directly that they seem almost cruel. He borders on inhuman, accepting his contentment yet blind to consequences. Meursault presents himself as one who is wholly unaware of his own strangeness and unconcerned about changing it. He accepts his nature, and his experiences of the world build up like heat in his consciousness, hardening his habits of being.
In the second half, the narrative takes a darker turn. Meursault recounts events from his trial that reveal the depth of society’s need for meaning and the extremes of its rejection of honesty. This is not to say he becomes emotional. What is, on the face of it, a retelling of his prosecution is charged with absurdity, particularly others’ reactions. He observes his lawyer with bewilderment and then the priest, who attempts salvation yet draws from him only a final, explosive assertion of meaninglessness. Unlike Meursault, the priest was certain, and carried within himself the comfort of belief. Yet rather than accept false solace through spiritual connection, Meursault erupted in defence of his empty universe. His remembered interactions with him betray his fundamental need to remain truthful. He swings violently here between calm and rage.
The novel’s concern with authenticity is reflected in its bright, unsparing setting, which serves as an extension of Meursault’s mind. The hot, sun-bleached streets in which he lives are a physical manifestation of his inner life, which is just as stark and unforgiving: a kind of purgatory where he exists in simple sensation. His world is bright, harsh and revealing, trapping him in his truth. He languishes in the glare of his existence, too honest to seek shelter in lies yet too human to sustain his detachment without consequence.
Through The Stranger, Camus explores existence, the absence of meaning, the pain of honesty, and the power of societal judgment with a skill that has preserved the story’s relevance through time. One is tempted here to say something about human nature. We cling to our illusions, demand performances of feeling, and seek meaning where none exists. Should I go on? We are all at risk, it seems, of becoming either Meursaults or his judges; perhaps it is a perennial tension.
And we are, by all measures, thoroughly uncomfortable with truth. Meursault’s detachment is ceaseless but also timeless, reflecting our impulse to reject those who expose the emptiness of our conventions. We cannot bring ourselves to face the meaninglessness of existence, to accept our common absurdity. Better that we affirm our illusions, even if we live in denial. Camus’s prose, spare and at times brutal, mirrors the narrator’s own unadorned thoughts, challenging us to confront the discomfort of seeing ourselves in a mind as honest and unsentimental as Meursault’s.
The Stranger is, in the end, a study in authenticity and societal pressure. It is a plunge into the mind of one who accepts meaninglessness yet finds peace in that acceptance, who faces judgment yet refuses to pretend. It is as much a mirror as it is a warning, causing us to question our performances, our rationalizations, our perceived morality, and the bright glare of our own pretences. Through this stark and unsettling portrait, which has all the unforgiving clarity of the Algerian sun, Camus has left us something that is both alienating and profound, enormously prescient, a major work of philosophical fiction and a testament to his genius at laying bare the human condition.
