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A review by thegbrl
The Stranger by Albert Camus
3.0
"I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world."
Camus' seminal work, The Stranger (L'etranger), is a dual interrogation and invocation of existentialist thought, from the lens of the "everyday man". Mersault's detachment from the humanist and liberalist preconceptions reject the values that dominated French colonial society. It attacks the "revolutionary spirit" that formed the zeitgeist of twentieth-century France, and is built upon the ashes of successive revolution and resistance. This indifference immediately assaults the responder and generates an unease that permeates the text with indelible intrigue and precision. Mersault narrates "memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore" with apathetic objectivity, allowing Camus to denounce other-worldliness in favour of realism and presence, affirming the maxim that "existence precedes essence"; another direct contradiction of Descartes' "Cogito, ergo sum" from this period of continental philosophy.
Whilst a work of significant subject matter, the novel itself highlights the simultaneous inaccessibility and universality of existentialism – it can be argued that this is why liberal humanism continues to be predominant in secularism today. Compared to his contemporaries, such as Sartre, de Bouvier, and Merleau-Ponty, Camus' writing is certainly most accessible. And whilst he refused to consider himself "existentialist" per se, the influence of this movement on The Stranger exudes from every line. However, I found the literary value of this work, from a Formalist perspective, to be a lacking, overshadowed by Camus' evident postmodernist philosophy. I found the prose to be less detailed, and this was distracting at times, however, this can be attributed to Camus' journalistic background, similar to Hemingway. To this end, the text seems to lose its value as a literary work. Comparisons can be drawn between The Stranger and Sartre's Nausea (La Nausée) though Nausea seems to instil a greater sense of anxiety and despair from existence, whereas The Stranger explores the absurdity of reality itself. Camus' achievement here is in propagating the ideals of existentialist humanism to study the interaction of humanity in an unforgiving and alienating world.
Camus' seminal work, The Stranger (L'etranger), is a dual interrogation and invocation of existentialist thought, from the lens of the "everyday man". Mersault's detachment from the humanist and liberalist preconceptions reject the values that dominated French colonial society. It attacks the "revolutionary spirit" that formed the zeitgeist of twentieth-century France, and is built upon the ashes of successive revolution and resistance. This indifference immediately assaults the responder and generates an unease that permeates the text with indelible intrigue and precision. Mersault narrates "memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore" with apathetic objectivity, allowing Camus to denounce other-worldliness in favour of realism and presence, affirming the maxim that "existence precedes essence"; another direct contradiction of Descartes' "Cogito, ergo sum" from this period of continental philosophy.
Whilst a work of significant subject matter, the novel itself highlights the simultaneous inaccessibility and universality of existentialism – it can be argued that this is why liberal humanism continues to be predominant in secularism today. Compared to his contemporaries, such as Sartre, de Bouvier, and Merleau-Ponty, Camus' writing is certainly most accessible. And whilst he refused to consider himself "existentialist" per se, the influence of this movement on The Stranger exudes from every line. However, I found the literary value of this work, from a Formalist perspective, to be a lacking, overshadowed by Camus' evident postmodernist philosophy. I found the prose to be less detailed, and this was distracting at times, however, this can be attributed to Camus' journalistic background, similar to Hemingway. To this end, the text seems to lose its value as a literary work. Comparisons can be drawn between The Stranger and Sartre's Nausea (La Nausée) though Nausea seems to instil a greater sense of anxiety and despair from existence, whereas The Stranger explores the absurdity of reality itself. Camus' achievement here is in propagating the ideals of existentialist humanism to study the interaction of humanity in an unforgiving and alienating world.