The Stranger Analysis

Perhaps more than facial expressions, the sun is an apt indicator (and perhaps, predicting device for us, much like Punxsutawney Phil). However, also like Punxsutawney Phil, these predictions are v...

The Stranger traces a year in the life of a young clerk working for a shipping company in 1940s Algiers. The setting – both time and place – are important to understand one vital piece...

Meursault is our narrator, and he tells it as he sees, feels, and thinks it. Not a hint of third-person omniscience exists, because the story is purely subjective from Meursault’s point-of-vi...

The Stranger is philosophical literature at its best – it uses a fictional story to promote or explore one specific philosophy: Absurdism, in this case. You’re going to hear a lot of pe...

The Stranger is written in a forthright, matter-of-fact and unornamental style. There’s little color to the novel, though it has some poetic qualities. Without the occasional irony or sarcasm...

Frivolous language is absent, but Camus's descriptions are meticulous. With this painstaking attention to detail, we get everything from the roundness of Marie’s breasts to the type of green...

Let’s start with, what is the title? In case you didn’t know, Camus was French; so he wrote The Stranger in French, and because it seemed appropriate, gave it a French title: L'Étr...

Meursault is detached. Meursault is unaffected by his mother’s death, living the same mundane life he always has, clerking at the shipping company, rendezvousing with a new girlfriend, and pa...

Meursault is judged to be pathetic, dark, and frozen by society; however, he couldn’t care less. Deliberately frozen in an isolated state, Meursault is content not making sense of the world h...

We experience the everyday life of Meursault through his eyes and narration. Basically, Meursault doesn’t really care for his mother (or her death), he loves to have casual sex on the beach w...

We never know Meursault’s first name in The Stranger. His last name, however, is the same as that of Patrice Meursault, the protagonist in A Happy Death, another book by Camus. (Recycled, muc...

This book is sexy, but so is any work by the French, actually. It stops at titillation, however. We get some rubbing and some fondling, but that’s as far as it goes. The content, however, is...

Friedrich Nietzsche: The Anti-Christ (2.1.13)Fernandel – A French actor and singer (1.2.2, 2.4.2)