L'Étranger Reading Order

L'Étranger (The Stranger, 1942) by Albert Camus is one of the most discussed novels of the twentieth century: Meursault, a French Algerian clerk, shoots an Arab man on a beach for no reason he can fully articulate, and then, at his trial, is condemned less for the murder than for his failure to weep at his mother's funeral and his general emotional flatness in the face of events that society considers momentous. The novel is the fullest expression of Camus's concept of the absurd — the confrontation between a human being who demands meaning and a universe that offers none — and Meursault is the embodiment of what Camus called the absurd man: not nihilistic but genuinely indifferent, living in the present moment without consoling narratives about the past or future. The first part of the novel is a masterpiece of flat, detached narration — the sentences are short, the temperature is physical, and Meursault registers sensation rather than meaning. The second part, in which society attempts to make his indifference mean something through the apparatus of law and prosecution, shows the absurd in its social dimension: the murder matters less than the failure of proper feeling. Camus wrote the novel in Algiers in 1940–1941 during the German Occupation and published it in 1942 alongside Le Mythe de Sisyphe, which provides the philosophical framework.