Albert Camus was born on
November 7, 1913,
in French colonial Algeria. In 1914, his
father was killed in World War I, at the Battle of the Marne. Albert,
his mother, and his brother shared a two-bedroom apartment with
the family’s maternal grandmother and a paralyzed uncle. Despite
his family’s extreme poverty, Camus attended the University of Algiers,
supporting his education by working a series of odd jobs. However,
one of several severe attacks of tuberculosis forced him to drop
out of school. The poverty and illness Camus experienced as a youth
greatly influenced his writing.
After dropping out of the university, Camus eventually
entered the world of political journalism. While working for an
anti-colonialist newspaper, he wrote extensively about poverty in
Algeria. From 1935 to 1938,
Camus ran the Théâtre de l’Equipe, an organization that attempted
to attract working-class audiences to performances of great dramatic
works. During World War II, Camus went to Paris and became a leading
writer for the anti-German resistance movement. He was also the
editor of Combat, an important underground newspaper.
While in wartime Paris, Camus developed his philosophy
of the absurd. A major component of this philosophy was Camus’s
assertion that life has no rational or redeeming meaning. The experience of
World War II led many other intellectuals to similar conclusions. Faced
with the horrors of Hitler’s Nazi regime and the unprecedented slaughter
of the War, many could no longer accept that human existence had
any purpose or discernible meaning. Existence seemed simply, to
use Camus’s term, absurd.
The Stranger, Camus’s first novel, is
both a brilliantly crafted story and an illustration of Camus’s
absurdist world view. Published in 1942,
the novel tells the story of an emotionally detached, amoral young
man named Meursault. He does not cry at his mother’s funeral, does
not believe in God, and kills a man he barely knows without any
discernible motive. For his crime, Meursault is deemed a threat
to society and sentenced to death. When he comes to accept the “gentle
indifference of the world,” he finds peace with himself and with
the society that persecutes him.
Camus’s absurdist philosophy implies that moral orders
have no rational or natural basis. Yet Camus did not approach the
world with moral indifference, and he believed that life’s lack
of a “higher” meaning should not necessarily lead one to despair.
On the contrary, Camus was a persistent humanist. He is noted for
his faith in man’s dignity in the face of what he saw as a cold,
indifferent universe.
In 1942, the same year that The
Stranger was published, Camus also published The
Myth of Sisyphus, his famous philosophical essay on the
absurd. These two works helped establish Camus’s reputation as an
important and brilliant literary figure. Over the course of his
career he produced numerous novels, plays, and essays that further
developed his philosophy. Among his most notable novels are The
Plague, published in 1947, and The
Fall, published in 1956. Along with The
Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel stands as
his best-known philosophical essay. In recognition of his contribution
to French and world literature, Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1957. Tragically, he died in
an automobile accident just three years later.
In the midst of the widespread intellectual and moral
bewilderment that followed World War II, Camus’s was a voice advocating the
values of justice and human dignity. Though his career was cut short,
he remains one of the most influential authors of the twentieth
century, regarded both for the quality of his fiction and for the depth
and insightfulness of his philosophy.
Camus, Existentialism & The Stranger
The Stranger is often referred to as
an “existential” novel, but this description is not necessarily
accurate. The term “existentialism” is a broad and far-reaching
classification that means many different things to many different
people, and is often misapplied or overapplied. As it is most commonly
used, existentialism refers to the idea that there is no “higher”
meaning to the universe or to man’s existence, and no rational order
to the events of the world. According to this common definition
of existentialism, human life is not invested with a redemptive
or affirming purpose—there is nothing beyond man’s physical existence.
Some ideas in The Stranger clearly resemble
this working definition of existentialism, but the broader philosophy
of existentialism includes aspects far beyond this definition that
are not present in The Stranger. Moreover, Camus
himself rejected the application of the “existential” label to The
Stranger. Hence, this SparkNote approaches The
Stranger from the philosophical perspective of the absurd.
“The absurd” is a term Camus himself coined, and a philosophy that
he himself developed. Reading The Stranger with
Camus’s philosophy of the absurd in mind sheds a good deal of light
on the text.
Although Camus’s philosophical ideas resonate strongly
within the text, it is important to keep in mind that The
Stranger is a novel, not a philosophical essay. When reading
the novel, character development, plot, and prose style demand just
as much attention as the specifics of the absurd. This SparkNote
only discusses the absurd when such discussion provides insight
on the text. Otherwise, the focus of this SparkNote remains on the
text itself, as with any great work of literature.
