Thoughts on The Stranger

I recently reread Camus's The Stranger and was struck by how differently it hit me this time around. Reading it as an older, presumably less naive person revealed layers I'd completely missed before.

The novel is often discussed as an example of absurdism, and Meursault is frequently treated as some kind of authentic existential hero. But I'm increasingly convinced that this reading misses something darker and more unsettling about what Camus actually created.

What strikes me most about Meursault isn't his philosophical detachment but his complete lack of empathy. This isn't someone who refuses to perform emotions he doesn't feel - it's someone who genuinely doesn't feel them. Marie's affection, his neighbours' attempts at connection, even Raymond's manipulative friendship all bounce off him like he's made of stone.

The exception, tellingly, is his treatment of the Arab characters, who remain unnamed and barely acknowledged as human. This isn't accidental - Camus grew up in colonial Algeria and would have been intimately familiar with how the French settler population systematically dehumanized the Arab majority.

Meursault's final revelation in prison is often read as a moment of existential triumph, where he achieves peace by accepting "the gentle indifference of the world." But, another reading could be that after exploding at the chaplain, he realizes he's always been happy precisely because of his indifference. His great insight is that he was right all along to care about nothing and no one.

Most disturbing is his final wish for a crowd to greet his execution "with cries of hate." He wants their hatred as proof that he was correct to reject human connection entirely. It's not enlightenment - it's the final crystallization of his solipsism into something he's genuinely pleased about.

There's something almost sadistic about how Camus constructs this ending. He provides all the philosophical vocabulary needed to make Meursault's "authenticity" sound profound, then watches as readers contort themselves to find redemption in what is essentially a moral void achieving self-satisfaction.

The timing matters too. Published in 1942, during the Occupation, when questions of moral responsibility and collaboration were urgent realities, Camus offers up a protagonist who achieves happiness by rejecting moral engagement entirely. Whether intentionally or not, he created the perfect test of how far readers will go to intellectualize away basic human decency.

The fact that Meursault's victim is an unnamed Arab man in colonial Algeria adds another layer of complicity. French readers would have recognized the casual dehumanization, yet the novel has been celebrated for decades as a profound meditation on authenticity rather than a cautionary tale about the dangers of mistaking indifference for wisdom.

Meursault doesn't just murder someone - he murders someone from an already systematically dehumanized group, feels nothing about it, and then achieves philosophical peace by never acknowledging his victim's humanity.

Perhaps Camus was deliberately trolling his readers, creating a character whose moral emptiness gets dressed up as existential profundity. If so, the joke's been on us for eighty years, as we continue to teach The Stranger as a cornerstone of modern literature rather than recognizing it as a brilliant deconstruction of how philosophical sophistication can mask basic moral failure.

The novel's enduring appeal might say more about our own capacity for ethical blindness than about any profound truths Meursault supposedly embodies.